U.S scientists announced that powerful solar blasts could have hit Earth in 2012 which may have caused massive damage on the planet's magnetic field and electrical grids.
This event was detected by the STEREO Spacecraft of NASA, and is predicted to have been able to knock off communication and global positioning system satellites.
Janet Luhman, a researcher from the University of California Berkeley, reported that these violent bursts of solar winds produced by the Sun on July 23, 2012 may have reached Earth if they happened nine days earlier.
"Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous," Luhmann expressed in a statement, as reported by Reuters.
This event would have been similar to the 1859 solar storm at Carrington, which heavily affected telegraph systems of the entire United States. A 2013 research claimed that a solar storm with the same intensity as the Carrington Event would have cost $2.6 trillion out of the world's current economy.
These bursts produced by the Sun are referred to as coronal mass ejections. The ejections observed in 2012would have made an impact on the Earth's northern region and caused a drastic change in electrical currents. This change is also predicted to have been powerful enough to interfere with the functioning of communication and global positioning system satellites.
The researchers that coronal mass ejections happen all the time, however, these blasts are very weak compared to the solar storms of 1859 and 2012.
She also added that scientists can now gain more knowledge about these solar storms and predict when they happen through analyzing the data gathered by different sun-observing spacecraft.
"We have the opportunity to really look closely at one of these events in all of its glory and look at why in this instance was so extreme," Luhmann told Reuters.
This study was published in the March 18 issue of Nature Communications.
