What happened
On September 1, 1859, just after eleven o’clock, English amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, while sketching sunspots, saw two blindingly bright points of light on the Sun’s disk – the same flare was observed independently by Richard Hodgson. Less than a day later, a cloud of charged matter reached Earth. On the night of September 1–2, auroras lit up the skies over Europe, the Americas, and Australia; they were seen even in Cuba, Jamaica, and Hawaii. In the Rocky Mountains, miners got up in the night, thinking it was already dawn. Telegraph networks failed, operators received electric shocks, and some lines continued to work for a time after their batteries were disconnected, powered by currents induced in the wires.
Witnesses
Astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson, who saw the flare; the auroras were watched by millions of people around the world, and telegraph operators felt the effects.
Explanations and hypotheses
The phenomenon is well explained: a powerful solar flare and an accompanying coronal mass ejection struck Earth’s magnetosphere, triggering a geomagnetic storm and auroras at low latitudes. In terms of strength, it ranks among the largest in the history of measurements. Today the Carrington Event serves as a benchmark for assessing the risk that a similar storm would pose to power grids and satellites.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
More: Wikipedia (pl) Wikipedia (en)