Tree Rings Unlock Evidence of Mysterious Cosmic Radiation ‘Storms’
The universe is billions of years old, but telescopes and the modern study of the cosmos have only been around for a few centuries. So scientists turn to unlikely sources, like tree rings, for data on cosmic events that predate Galileo.
Over the years, tree ring data from around the world has shown evidence of several unexplained and potentially devastating space weather events that delivered a dose of radiation to Earth and many of its inhabitants, including the trees themselves.
“These huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years, but what causes them is unclear,” explained physicist Benjamin Pope from Australia’s University of Queensland, in a statement. “The leading theory is that they are huge solar flares.”
Pope led a team of researchers who analyzed tree ring data dating back over a millennia to investigate the link between Miyake events and solar flares. Their study findings appear in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
In the paper, the team notes that one of the events with the most tree ring data occurred in the year 774 and appears to have been more than 10 times as powerful as the Carrington event of 1859, which was a geomagnetic storm tied to eruptions on the sun. When the blast hit Earth, it reportedly caused telegraph lines to burst into flames and generated global auroras.
“We need to know more, because if one of these happened today, it would destroy technology including satellites,
