When they say ‘sudden’ they don’t mean short-lived. The report notes that ‘some of the events, unlike the brief flashes we recognize as solar flares, lasted for one or two years’. Only a handful of these so-called ‘cosmic barrages’ have occurred in the last 9000 years or so, according to the data.
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One of the events was 80 times more powerful than the strongest solar flare ever recorded, says LiveScience.
A series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels across Earth’s history could have come from a series of unknown, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cosmic events, a new study has revealed.
Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings.
The exact cause of the…
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