The Scary Truth About NASA’s ‘Smiling Sun’ Photo – SlashGear

Spooky personification of the sun’s surface is not entirely unusual. In 2014, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured an image of solar activity creating the surface appearance of a jack-o-lantern, dubbed “Pumpkin Sun.” Despite the seeming regularity of these events, a coronal hole (or geomagnetic) storm of serious proportions is “long overdue,” Keating told The Post. In 1859, a strong geomagnetic event originating from the sun known as “The Carrington Event” set fire to multiple telegraph stations.

Such storms could be occurring as frequently as every year, but Keating says the Earth has “dodged all these magnetic bullets for so long.” With our dependence on technology-based communications, a significant coronal hole blast could come with some hefty consequences. Geomagnetic storms are ranked on a five-level scale of severity by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

The “Smiling Sun” event was ranked as a G1. An “extreme” geomagnetic storm, or a G5, would set off a number of systemic problems — sweeping power outages, grid collapse, spacecraft damage, a radio blackout lasting a couple days, interrupted satellite navigation, and visible aurora as far south as Florida and southern Texas,(via NOAA). NOAA’s predicted frequency of a G5 storm is unsettling — four per every 11 years. But as Keating explained, Earth has been lucky for a few centuries. If or when our luck runs out, Keating says, “it could be really scary, and the consequences could be much more dramatic.”