Scientists Warn New ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ Sun Event Is 500x Stronger

Did you see the Northern Lights a year ago? According to NASA, May 10-11, 2025’s aurora displays were the most intense since 2003, with some scientists suggesting that they may have been the strongest for 500 years. However, they barely register when compared to what appears to be the strongest solar event ever detected — a massive solar particle storm during the last Ice Age that was about 500 times stronger than any modern solar storm.

Extreme Spike

What happened 14,300 years ago is barely believable. A paper published this week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters details a study of tree rings in the French Alps that reveals evidence of an extreme spike in radiocarbon corresponding to 12,350 B.C. during the final stages of the last Ice Age.

It wasn't a solar storm but a solar particle storm, during which a burst of fast-moving, highly energetic protons caused a solar radiation storm around Earth.

“This event establishes a new worst-case scenario,” said Kseniia Golubenko, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. “Understanding its scale is critical for evaluating the risks posed by future solar storms to modern infrastructure like satellites, power grids, and communication systems.”

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Modeling Solar Events

Using a chemistry-climate model designed to reconstruct ancient solar particle storms — and verified using tree rings — the researchers calculated that the 12,350 B.C. event was about 18% stronger than the strongest solar storm ever recorded in tree-ring archives. That happened in 775 A.D. However, in the modern context, there is no close rival.

“Compared to the largest event of the modern satellite era — the 2005 particle storm — the ancient 12350 BC event was over 500 times more intense, according to our estimates”, said Golubenko. “The ancient event in 12,350 BC is the only known extreme solar particle event outside of the Holocene epoch, the past 12,000 years of stable warm climate. Other massive solar particle storms have occurred around 994 AD, 663 BC, 5259 BC and 7176 BC.

Miyake Events

The solar particle event of 14,300 years ago is in a different class than the famous Carrington event in September 1859, when astronomer Richard C. Carrington observed the most powerful solar flare ever recorded. It sparked auroras down to the tropics. However, the Carrington event was not accompanied by a solar particle storm.

Such standout solar events are known as Miyake events, after the Japanese researcher who named them. “Miyake events allow us to pin down exact calendar years in floating archaeological chronologies,” said Ilya Usoskin, a co-author of the paper and a professor at the University of Oulu. The radiocarbon signals from Miyake events have helped historians to precisely date Viking settlements in Newfoundland and Neolithic communities in Greece.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.