IT sounds like the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie, but if a large solar storm hit Earth it could potentially wipe out the electric grid, says ANU astrophysicist Dr Brad Tucker.

“Everything will collapse as soon as electricity is out, nothing will work,” Brad says. 

“The sun can really can screw with everything and we don’t think about it that way.”

According to Brad, people often only think about the sun as a thing that burns them, but it’s there and it’s active, and a solar storm is one way it can affect the Earth. 

A solar storm, which is a disturbance on the sun, can emanate outward across the heliosphere, affecting the entire solar system, including Earth and its magnetosphere.

“In 1859 there was the Carrington Event – a massive solar eruption that knocked out the electrical grid,” Brad says. 

“When the sun erupts, the plasma that leaves is magnetically charged, so if it hits things that are electric or magnetic, it disrupts it. 

“All of the energy comes into the North and South Poles into the two points and the stronger it comes into the poles, it starts to leak out from there.

“In 1989 a similar storm hit the North Pole and knocked out the electric grids in southern Canada.”

At the turn of the century, Brad says these huge solar storms led to a push to study the sun continuously worldwide.

Mount Stromlo, originally titled the Conservative Solar Observatory, which used to be a government department, was built to study the sun, according to Brad. 

He says Mount Stromlo is still used to learn more about the sun.  

“We know a lot about the sun but we probably don’t know how much we can or should given how important it is and the effect it has on life,” he says. 

In recent months, NASA was able to shed some new light on the sun when its Parker Solar Probe became the spacecraft that’s been the closest to the sun. With scientific instruments to measure the environment around the spacecraft, it completed three of 24 planned passes through never-before-explored parts of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. 

“The idea is to get as close as you can to it, to figure out where the solar wind comes from,” Brad says.

“If you know what’s creating this wind and storms, you can then predict the likelihood of one and when it’ll happen.”

Brad says the questions that need to be answered are: “How do we know what the sun is doing? And how do we predict and maintain it, just as we do with any other weather system on Earth?”

He says it’s important to be able to understand solar storms just as people monitor and understand events such as storms and fires. 

“At any one point something in the sun can flip and as soon as it flips it shoots out plasma and gas,” he says. 

The sun, which has a minima and maxima extreme in its 11-year cycle, is currently in its minima, according to Brad, who says it’ll become more active when it moves into its more active, maxima cycle. 

“But then when it’s right at the bottom of the minima, then the sun is very quiet,” he says. 

“[Another storm] will happen at some point and even if a solar storm is not big enough to cause disruption on the earth, it can affect the satellites. 

“People don’t realise their life is run by satellites. As soon as you live in a city, you’re way more reliable to satellites. The reason we’re a globally connected world is because satellites are connecting us. 

“[And] the reason that we care about the sun is because our dependence on technology can be wiped out.”