New light has been shed on a baffling, unusual, and possibly destroying sort of astrophysical occasion, because of a College of Queensland (UQ) study.
A group of scientists, drove by Dr. Benjamin Pope from UQ's School of Math and Material science, applied state of the art measurements to information from centuries old trees, to figure out more about radiation 'storms'.
“These huge bursts of cosmic radiation, known as Miyake Events, have occurred approximately once every thousand years but what causes them is unclear,” Dr. Pope said.
“The leading theory is that they are huge solar flares. We need to know more, because if one of these happened today, it would destroy technology including satellites, internet cables, long-distance power lines, and transformers. The effect on global infrastructure would be unimaginable.”
Enter the modest tree ring.
First creator Qingyuan Zhang, a UQ undergrad mathematics student, created programming to examine each accessible piece of information on tree rings.
"Rather than a single instantaneous explosion or flare, what we may be looking at is a kind of astrophysical ‘storm’ or outburst.” — Qingyuan Zhang
"Because you can count a tree’s rings to identify its age, you can also observe historical cosmic events going back thousands of years,” Mr Zhang said.
“When radiation strikes the atmosphere it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters through the air, oceans, plants, and animals, and produces an annual record of radiation in tree rings."
“We modeled the global carbon cycle to reconstruct the process over a 10,000-year period, to gain insight into the scale and nature of the Miyake Events.”
The normal hypothesis, as of not long ago, has been that Miyake Occasions are goliath sun powered flares.
"But our results challenge this,” Mr. Zhang said. “We’ve shown they’re not correlated with sunspot activity, and some actually last one or two years.
“Rather than a single instantaneous explosion or flare, what we may be looking at is a kind of astrophysical ‘storm’ or outburst.”
“The effect on global infrastructure would be unimaginable.” — Dr. Benjamin Pope
Dr. Pope said the fact scientists don’t know exactly what Miyake Events are, or how to predict their occurrence is very disturbing.
In light of accessible information, there's around a one percent chance of seeing another inside the following ten years. In any case, we don't have any idea how to foresee it or what hurts it might cause. These chances are very disturbing, and establish the groundwork for additional examination.
The review was additionally finished with undergrad maths and physical science understudies Utkarsh Sharma and Jordan Dennis. The work was upheld by a humanitarian gift to UQ from the Central issues Institut.
Reference: “Modelling cosmic radiation events in the tree-ring radiocarbon record” by Qingyuan Zhang, Utkarsh Sharma, Jordan A. Dennis, Andrea Scifo, Margot Kuitems, Ulf Büntgen, Mathew J. Owens, Michael W. Dee and Benjamin J. S. Pope , Proceedings of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences.