When British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington went into his private observatory, connected to his home near London, shortly before noon on 1 September 1859, he intended to sketch sunspots. But his attention was seized by something he had never seen before on the Sun: "two patches of intensely bright and white light". Carrington - and at the same time, fellow astronomer Richard Hodgson - had just witnessed a massive solar flare. It lasted only a few minutes, but the subatomic particles it hurled at Earth would cause the greatest recorded geomagnetic storm in history, peaking the next day.
This story is from the September 2022 edition of BBC History UK.
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This story is from the September 2022 edition of BBC History UK.
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