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What observation did Richard Carrington make before the 1859 geomagnetic storm?
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Space weather
Earth's full North Polar auroral oval, in an image taken in ultraviolet light by the U.S. Polar spacecraft over northern Canada, April 6, 1996. In the colour-coded image, which simultaneously shows dayside and nightside auroral activity, the most intense levels of activity are red, and the lowest levels are blue. Polar, launched in February 1996, was designed to further scientists' understanding of how plasma energy contained in the solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetosphere.
On September 1, 1859, one day before the largest recorded geomagnetic storm, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a white-light solar flare for the first time.12
He described this event as a bright spot that suddenly appeared on the Sun. While Carrington noted the coincidence between this solar flare and the subsequent geomagnetic storm, he did not claim a direct causal connection at the time. This observation is now considered a foundational moment that prefigured the modern scientific discipline of space weather research. It is currently understood that the active region responsible for the flare likely also produced a fast coronal mass ejection, which triggered the intense geomagnetic activity on Earth.12