LONDON (TIP): A solar ‘megastorm’ , expected to hit Earth in the near future, could knock out the planet’s communication satellites, cause power cuts and disrupt crucial navigation aids and aircraft avionics , experts have warned. The extreme space storm is caused by the Sun ejecting billions of tonnes of highlyenergetic matter travelling at 1609344 kilometres per hour. However, engineers say it is impossible to predict more than about 30 minutes before it actually happens, The Independent reported.
Such solar superstorms are estimated to occur once every 100 or 200 years, with the last one hitting the Earth in 1859. Although none has occurred in the space age, we are far more vulnerable now than a century ago because of the ubiquity of modern electronics , engineers said. “The general consensus is that a solar superstorm is inevitable , a matter not of ‘if ‘ but ‘when?’,” says a report into extreme space weather by a group of experts at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. There have been a number of “near misses” in the past half century, when an explosive “coronal mass ejection” of energetic matter from the Sun narrowly bypassed the Earth. A relatively minor solar storm in 1989 knocked out several key electrical transformers in the Canadian national grid, causing major power blackouts