30 Awesome Space Facts

Hey everyone, in this post I'm going to go over a hell of a lot of space facts. If you like space/ cosmology/ science, this here is the post for you! Buckle up.

1. The oldest known galaxy. The oldest and therefore furthest known galaxy we have ever discovered is over 13.7 billion light years away. It's called z8_GND_5296. The light has taken so long to reach us that the previous star which collapsed to form the gas which our Sun is made out of wasn't even born yet. 13.7 billion light-years only really takes into account the time that the light from this galaxy has taken to reach us. From the expansion of space, the distant galaxy pictured here would actually be about 13.1 gigalight-years away. Galaxies this far away help astronomers understand the very early universe and how it has evolved over time. This one is so old that it likely existed a mere 700 million years after the big bang. https://www.space.com/23306-ancient-galaxy-farthest-ever-seen.html

2. The first imaged exoplanet. This image is of the first ever extrasolar planet directly imaged, Formalhaut b. An extrasolar planet is a planet that is circling another star. Just as the Earth goes around the Sun, Formalhaut b goes around the star named Formalhaut. This planet is around the same size as Jupiter. The black circle at the centre is where the star is, masked by a filter to hide its most prominent glare. http://www.exoplanetkyoto.org/exohtml/Fomalhaut_b.html

3. The 'Death Star' galaxy. Whilst scientists were perusing some data, they noticed a pair of galaxies circling each other. This was not uncommon. What was interesting though was that they noticed a highly energetic blast coming from the main 'parent' galaxy and travelling straight at its orbiting companion. The beam is probably exploding out from the super-massive black hole in the middle of the parent. They christened the bigger galaxy the "Death Star" galaxy. It is likely that any life that may have existed in the smaller of the two was completely wiped out by this smiting jet of energy. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/07-139.html

4. The Earth-Moon distance. The distance from the Earth to the moon is often underestimated/ mis-represented in cinema. The image here shows a more accurate representation of the distance to our companion. https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

5. Titan. Titan, the moon of Saturn, is another body in the Solar System that has land, seas and atmosphere. It is very similar to the Earth in that it has features such as rivers, lakes, dunes and seasonal weather patterns. One of the most interesting things about Titan is that its atmosphere is comprised almost 90-95% Nitrogen. It is comparable in this only to the Earth, which is itself 80% Nitrogren. Compared to the other mostly-stark moons of Saturn, this is quite strange... where did all that Nitrogen come from? Before you book your vacation, Titan may look similar to Earth but they're actually very, very different, Titans Oceans and precipitation is made chiefly of Methane (it has to be incredibly cold to rain liquid Methane). The moon also exists inside of Saturn's magnetosphere, rendering it uninhabitable to humans. http://www.astrobio.net/topic/solar-system/saturn/titan/titan-a-moon-with-atmosphere/

6. Super Earth. A Super Earth is a classification given to a type of planet that sits in the habitable zone of it's parent star (like the Earth) and looks to be made up of the same basic atmospheric conditions. Super Earths are, by definition, much much bigger than the Earth. The closest one we have discovered is called 40 Eridani A b and it sits about 16 light years away. http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/planet/HD%2026965%20b/

7. Andromeda is coming for us. Analysis of data taken from studies into Andromeda's red-shift (the term referring to the devolution of light as it carries over time, warping its frequency/color) states that Andromeda is heading right for us. The Milky Way and Andromeda will some day collide with one another and the supermassive black holes at their cores will merge. The collision will burst billions of stars into existence and force supernovae onto millions of others. It's likely that the Earth and Sun won't be around by this point, the event sits right on the cusp of when we expect the Sun to be dying. Due to the relative position of the Sun in the Milky Way, though, we'd either be thrown right into the middle of the chaos, or flung into the emptiness of space. https://www.universetoday.com/141750/this-is-what-itll-look-like-when-the-milky-way-and-andromeda-galaxies-collide-billions-of-years-from-now/

8. The Heliosphere The Heliosphere is a sort of protective bubble around the entirety of the solar system. The magnetic fields generated by the plasma of the Sun protect the entire Solar System from cosmic radiation in the outside galaxy. http://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics/focus-areas/heliosphere/

9, Aurora Night-time Aurora are an elastic snap-back of the magnetic fields created by the Earth. They occur because the Sun bombards the Earth with high energy solar winds all the time. This energy smashes against this protective magnetic field which surrounds our planet, stretching it. Aurora occur when the field stretches out to a point where it cannot maintain itself anymore, snapping back to the Earth. The bounce back flings high energy particles at our planet's atmosphere, causing it to glow. Aurora of the day are far more difficult to see, but they do exist. They are caused by energetic particles from the Sun 'breaking through the gap' of the Earth's magnetic field as it stretches. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26381685

10. Black Hole jets align themselves to mass density. Scientists have discovered that there is a geometrical alignment of Black Hole jets to mass densities in the universe. In the image above, you can see an example rendering of Black Holes aligned to the web structure of the universe (see the lines stuck through them for their jet direction). http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-alignment-quasar-axes-large-scale-structures-02285.html

11. The flatness of the Solar System. When the solar system was born it was a dense cloud of gas and dust. This dust was swirling in all directions orbiting a brand new baby star, the Sun. As the clouds of particles crashed into each other the momentum they carried cancelled out. The direction with the most momentum managed to keep going and this, over great time, caused the cloud to flatten out into a disk through which the planets then formed. Despite this, Pluto is a bit of an outlier. The orbit of Pluto is actually angled at around 20 degrees offset from the Solar plane. This could possibly be to do with its distance from the Sun, its mass (meaning its affected by gravity more easily) or just because sometimes that can happen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmNXKqeUtJM http://www.universetoday.com/13865/orbit-of-pluto/

12. It's getting heavy, Doc. During nuclear fusion in a star, Hydrogen is fused into Helium... star process 101. Once all the Hydrogen is used up, gravity starts winning against the exploding force of the star, and the star contracts. This causes it to heat up, generating enough energy for Helium to then fuse together as well. The process starts again using helium, with the explosive force once again able to counter-act the force of gravity. After Helium, the star goes through a cycle of Carbon, Oxygen etc.. until finally it reaches Iron. The star puts so much energy into combining Iron atoms together that it cannot do any more. If the star's mass is big enough, it explodes. So much energy is released in a supernova that higher elements begin to form from it. The time-frame to form higher elements is so small that the elements you see after Iron are quite rare in Universe. The higher you go in Periodic Table, the rarer it is to see that element in Universe. Anything in your body that is not hydrogen was created in a star. Anything in your body that is heavier than Iron was made during a supernova. It's important to point out that many stars are simply not big enough to reach the Iron stage of fusion, and die out somewhere around the Carbon/ Oxygen stage instead. It's also highly speculated that to get Gold specifically, the process may require two stars smashing together. http://butane.chem.uiuc.edu/pshapley/GenChem1/L1/3.html http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2013-19

13. Hawking Radiation Hawking Radiation is the theoretical disintegration of black holes over time. The premise goes that throughout the universe there are constantly appearing virtual particle and anti-particle pairs. They suddenly exist, attract one another and then destroy one another. Stephen Hawking (for whom the radiation is named) surmised that on the extreme edge of a Black Hole's event horizon, a particle could escape the pull of a black hole and its twin gets pulled in. The escaped virtual particle would suddenly become a 'real' particle, such as a positron or electron. To become real, the particle must have an energy source sufficient enough to generate it and it uses the massive potential well of the Black Hole to do so. This removes energy from the Black Hole, dissipating it over a great amount of time. The particles that escape could then be measured as, basically, heat. The big deal about this is that a Supermassive Black Hole can no longer be considered the definite overall fate of the universe. If Black Holes can 'dissolve', then there really would be nothing left at the end of the Universe. http://physics.about.com/od/astronomy/f/hawkrad.htm

14. Dark Matter/ Dark Energy 96% of the universe is not observed. We know this because whenever we generate a simulation of the universe and try to emulate what we have observed nothing seems to work. The universe only seems to make sense when you introduce hidden matter and hidden energy. Not just a small amount of these either. Around only 4% of the universe is comprised of Baryons. That means stars, planets, waves, energies and anything else we currently have evidence of. Dark matter is said to outnumber regular matter by a factor of six, meaning our limited understanding of the universe doesn't really describe it that well at all. http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/dark-matter

15. Hoag's Object Possibly one of the most perplexing Galaxies in the night sky is 'Hoag’s Object'. The galaxy is visible to amateur astronomers and was discovered in 1950. The shape of the galaxy itself is clearly remarkable. It has a dense central bright core of older stars likely orbiting a Supermassive Black Hole (just like all Galaxies) and an orbiting debris of younger stars and dust. For some unknown reason, around the core of this Galaxy, is a gap. Experts believe some kind of massive collision may have caused this, the normal protocol with a ringed galaxy. However, the jury’s completely out because there's no remnants of another galaxy even remotely nearby. Even more fascinating and probably as rare a sight as you are going to get, inside its gap can be seen another ringed galaxy which is much, much further away. http://www.oddee.com/item_96598.aspx

16. Cruithne Incorrectly sometimes called Earth’s second moon, Cruithne is an asteroid that orbits in the pattern shown in the image. It has a co-orbital pattern, meaning it shares the solar orbit of the Earth whilst also being affected by the Earth itself. Cruithne is a prime example of a "horseshoe" orbit. A horseshoe orbit is a rare occurrence in which a body in space simply turns around and goes the other way. In the image example, notice how it moves back and forth from the Sun whilst also orbiting around it with the Earth. In a asteroid central view it would almost appears to spiral around the Sun, moving closer and further away in a kind of corkscrew pattern. Src: http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html

17. The Diamond Planet. PSR J1719-1438 and PSR J1719-1438b is a binary star system (which I’ll just call A and B from here on). B is a dead star and A is a highly active star. In fact, the difference in activity is so high that A has probably been stealing much of B’s external mass for a very long time. It's gotten to the point where there is basically nothing but a rocky core left of B. A has converted B into a super-dense planet. The new planet is about the same density as Jupiter but only around 40% the size (that’s dense, gang). Made primarily of Oxygen and Carbon, scientists believe B’s structure to be crystalline in nature, making it quite literally a gigantic (glowing) diamond. http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/psr-j1719-1438-the-star-that-turned-into-a-diamond-planet/

18. Saturn's Rings Saturn has the most extensive ring system in the entire Solar System, with shepherding moons guiding millions of small icy comets and dust debris around. They stretch out more than 12000km from the planet and are visible to the naked eye on a clear night. The most interesting aspect about these rings is how monumentally thin they are. The majority of the rings are actually around 30 feet thick (10 meters). That kind of width, if positioned edge on to the perspective of Earth, would make them invisible. It’s suspected that Saturn plays a role in controlling the flatness of the rings, its gravity spreading the ice and dust out, preventing the formation of moons. http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php.id=11&cat=solarsystem

19. Space Dog This cross breed husky named Laika was the first ever mammal to orbit the Earth. Back during the space race of the 60’s, the effects of space travel on living creatures was largely unknown (the most problematic was the effects of weightlessness). Instead of sending a human to do a Dog’s work, they sent Laika. Unfortunately for this female rescue dog from the streets of Moscow, Laika perished. There was no re-entry strategy considered before launch. Eventually her life support ran out and the capsule burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. Laika was one of a laundry list of animals launched into space since the 40’s, including Fruit Flies (the first animals in space), more Dogs, Rhesus Monkeys, Bull Frogs, Garden Spiders, Newts, Tardigrades, Tortoises, Rabbits, Cats, Chimpanzees and stow-away bacteria and viruses. Lets all spare a thought for space bat as well. Found clinging to the side of the Space Shuttle Discovery (possibly frozen) at its launch back in 2009. It's unclear how far the ambitious Fruit Bat made it out of the atmosphere before perishing. http://www.space.com/17764-laika-first-animals-in-space.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibq2IwznCgc

20. Hypervelocity and Intergalactic Stars Stars, as we know, are usually found clustered together in groups that we call galaxies. They orbit around Supermassive Black Holes. However, we find quite a lot of stars all alone in the middle of nowhere. These lonely travellers are called intergalactic stars. They live outside the bright lights of the big city and in the rural nothingness of space. We know they exist because, despite them being dim in the glow of the neighboring galaxies, we sometimes see supernovae when they die. Some scientists suggest that almost half of all stars that exist do so in this non-clustered, lonely state. To scientists, the most interesting stars that fly inside the nothingness are the ones that are moving blindingly fast. They're called 'Hypervelocity Stars' and the theory is that these are the ones expected to have actually once lived inside of a Galaxy. Scientists believe that the only thing powerful enough to eject a star from the incredible pull of billions of solar masses is if the star is sling-shotted by the Black Hole at a galactic core. This could perhaps happen if two galaxies collide and their shared pulls launch the star. These remnants that we see were once a part of an insanely powerful event, it’s what makes them so exciting to study. http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2012/04/rogue-stars-intergalactic-space/

21. Heat Death The Heat Death of the universe is intrinsically linked to the concept of Entropy. Without going into 100% detail about what Entropy actually represents and without trying to insult academics who study this (there is a hell of a lot to this topic)... Entropy is disorder. Let's say you have a sand castle made of millions of grains of sand. The grains in that sand castle could be said to be in an ordered state. In this state it has a low entropy value. The sand however, has an uncountable amount of ways to be disordered. You could step on the castle and destroy the structure or you could wait for the wind to blow it away. The idea is that to put those atoms once more into that ordered state you need some very rare and specific conditions. The grains of sand could be blown back into a sandcastle by the wind but it is far far far more likely that this would not happen. When it is disordered it has a high entropy value. The heat death of the universe is the idea that the universe is becoming more and more disordered. It predicts that at some point in trillions of years time the universe will be so disordered that it will reach a state of "Maximum Entropy" and all thermodynamic processes (like atomic interactions, chemical bonds, fusion etc) will completely stop. At this point the universe would reach a point of thermal equilibrium and there would be nothing left. No stars, no planets, no black holes (if you believe Hawking), no matter of any kind... hence this completely black image. Before this happens, scientists have predicted that there would be some interesting things that would occur. For instance, a theoretical type of star called an "Iron Star" might be produced due to cold fusion (if protons do not decay). An Iron star is exactly how it sounds, a gigantic cold sphere of Iron. http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae181.cfm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_star

22. Betelgeuse Explosion Anyone that has seen the original Men In Black will recognise that this is a picture of the Orion constellation. Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice...), labelled, is one of the biggest and brightest stars in the night sky. Betelgeuse is predicted to explode between now and a million years time. We know this because it has been dramatically shrinking recently, a normal prelude to a supernova. The explosion wouldn't cause much damage to the Earth, but in the night sky it will appear as a beautifully intense bright Star. Possibly even visible during the day. http://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/betelgeuse-will-explode-someday

23. Brown Dwarfs A Brown Dwarf can be considered the stepping stone between what is a planet and what is a star. A Gas Giant like Jupiter is comprised of, you guessed it, gas. The biggest and baddest Gas Giants are so big they can technically be considered sub-stars. These are called Brown Dwarfs. Brown Dwarfs are not massive enough to ignite and sustain Hydrogen-1 fusion, so they are therefore not technically stars. Speculation as to what characterisations a Gas Giant must have to become a Brown Dwarf is pretty wide ranging. Some say it must be of a particular size, some say it needs to have fused Deuterium (an isotope of Hydrogen) at some point in its existence. http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/cosmic_reference/brown_dwarfs.html

24. Gravitational Lensing Gravitational Lensing is where light from a distance object is distorted by intense gravitational fields of obstructing objects. The image above demonstrates the creation of a double-image due to the bending of spacetime. What is happening is that the light from the original object is shooting off into space, a massive body between it and the Earth is bending spacetime through gravity, which shifts the light back inwards. When the two images reach our satellites, the object appears to be in two different places at the same time. Here are some example photos of what lensing can actually look like (you may need to open in a new tab): http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1112/lensshoe_hubble_3235.jpg http://www.jonlomberg.com/images/digital_prints/dp_gravitational_lensing_2.gif http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Gravitational_lensing_in_galaxy_cluster.jpg http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/grav_lens.html http://www.spaceanswers.com/deep-space/if-photons-of-light-have-no-mass-how-can-space-be-bent-by-gravity/

25. Quasars Discovered in the 1960's, a Quasar (quasi-stellar object) is a highly energetic object surrounding an actively feeding Supermassive Black Hole (usually in the middle of a Galaxy). See the image? The Quasar is the bright central area of that Galaxy. In basic terms, a Black Hole feeds intermittently. As it feeds, gas swirls around it at unbelievable speeds and forms an insanely bright orbiting disk. This is accompanied by gigantic jets of gas. That is the Quasar. They are essentially 'fuelled' by the Black Holes they orbit. The Milky Way could theoretically generate a Quasar in the future if the Black Hole in the middle of it starts feeding again. The jets of matter you see in the image are produced by the swirling gases of the Quasar. It has been suggested that the existence of these slow down and even stop the formation of stars within the galaxy. Quasars are widely regarded to be the brightest objects in the universe. They are known to be sometimes brighter than entire Galaxies. Numbers-wise, the brightest we've seen is 4 trillion times brighter than the Sun. They're so bright you can see them from massive distances. http://www.spacetelescope.org/science/black_holes/ http://www.universetoday.com/13488/star-formation-extinguished-by-quasars/ Hubble took this image in the late 90's: http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/screen/opo9625a.jpg In the center of the image you can see two bright objects. The one to the right is a star, the one in the middle is a Quasar... it is also a million times further away. It is actually further away than the Galaxy in the image. The Quasar is over a million million time brighter than the star.

26. Redshift, Blueshift and Doppler The Doppler effect is where a wave changes with movement. This is depending on if the source of that wave is moving towards or away from an observer. The easiest way to explain this is with a police siren. When a police car that is blasting a siren is travelling towards you it sounds different than when it is driving away. The direction and speed of the car can manipulate the way the siren sounds to your perspective as the sound waves stretch and contract. The same process applies to photons of light. When objects move towards us, they appear more in the blue band of light (they become 'blue shifted'). When they move away they appear more in the red band of light (they become 'red shifted'). In Space we see mostly red-shifted light when we look at Galaxies (which is why they look 'redder' the further away they are). This is partly because of the doppler effect and because of the basic expansion of the universe stretching the wavelengths further.

27. Pulsars/ Neutron Stars A Neutron star is a remnant of a large dead star, brightly glowing after the star has died. They are incredibly dense... we're talking Mount Everest's weight in a tea spoon. They are also tremendously magnetic. The powerful magnetic field of a Neutron star generates high energy gamma jets which spew from the Star's magnetic poles. Scientists can measure the gamma radiation here on Earth if the jet is pointed in our direction. Pulsars are rapidly spinning Neutron stars. This means that the rays of gamma radiation seem to turn on and off as their direction points to us and then away from us. Imagine a lighthouse spinning. A spinning Neutron star seems to pulse in the night sky, hence the name 'Pulsar'. Due to the regularity and general consistency of a Pulsar's spin, it's suggested that they could be used in a kind of interstellar GPS system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGXaIU0lTU http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/universe/sights/pulsars http://science.howstuffworks.com/how-is-gps-used-in-spaceflight1.htm

28, Apophis Named after the Egyption anti-creator god and supposedly the bad guy from Stargate SG-1 (to whom its discoverers were fans), 99942 Apophis is an asteroid that passes by Earth around every 7 years. It's also big enough to cause some serious damage. Back in 2004 it churned up a fuss because the chances of an actual collision were over 2% (which in terms of the size of the solar system, is a massive percentage). Scientists were worried the asteroid would pass through something called a "Gravitational Keyhole", a well around 800 metres wide that would shift the Asteroid towards us on its next pass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis Obviously we're still here. If it does hit us though, estimates have it producing an explosion 15 times the power of the most powerful nuke ever detonated (Tsar Bomba) surpassing the nuclear arsenal of the entire planet combined. http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/27-10-2010/115543-asteroid_apophis-0/

29. The Multiverse A prevailing theory in astrophysics is that of a multiverse. There are a bunch of different ideas about this but they all revolve around the same basic premise. A multiverse is the idea that our universe is but one of a number of universes. You see this in science fiction a lot... the idea of a parallel Earth for which there are copies of everyone you know and love. Quantum mechanics speculates in the 'Many-Worlds' interpretation that for every decision made there is a universe created for which the decision goes one way and for which the decision goes another. We have simply flowed down to one of those paths. In this instance you could say that the universe we exist in is constantly brand new and simply a duplicate of a parent universe. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Schroedingers_cat_film.svg/2000px-Schroedingers_cat_film.svg.png http://listverse.com/2013/02/22/10-mind-bending-implications-of-the-many-worlds-theory/ Another idea is that we live in a hyper-dimensional universe for which our 3D universe is like a single page in a higher dimensional book. All other 'universes' are simply other pages. Here are some additional theories in video format for your enjoyment... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywn2Lz5zmYg Probably my favorite theory, and admittedly quite outlandish, involves Black Holes. The idea is that every Black Hole is a kind of... umbilical cord to a child universe and that an entire universe exists within it. The premise being that the Big Bang was caused by something happening in our own linked parent universe. http://bigthink.com/think-tank/we-may-be-living-inside-a-black-hole There's a similar one which discusses universal parentage and birth through connection in an Einstein-Rosen bridge (or wormhole). http://www.space.com/8293-universe-born-black-hole-theory.html

30. A Carrington Event And to finish off with a nice long one... Back in 1859, Richard Carrington discovered something that he affectionately named after himself, a Carrington 'event'. It's technically a natural disaster and it's something that could be catastrophic to our civilization. A Carrington event is a massive Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) fired from the Sun directly at the magnetosphere of the Earth. CME's are, according to NASA 'huge bubbles of gas threaded with magnetic field lines that are ejected from the Sun over the course of several hours'. To summarize as best I can, think of them like a gigantic cosmic wave of the Suns outer shell, fired off the from the surface at millions of nuclear bombs worth of energy. http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/CMEs.shtml http://earthsky.org/space/what-are-coronal-mass-ejections This gas is highly charged and interacts dramatically with the Earth's magnetosphere. When Carrington first discovered the wave, it created the most massive geomagnetic storm on record. Auroras were seen all over the globe (were talking as far south as the Caribbean). Aurora in the northern hemisphere were said to be so bright they awoke miners who then went to prepare breakfast thinking it was morning. But this sounds awesome... and surely it can't be dangerous to us if we survived last time right? Kinda. An event such as this has very little effect on the natural processes of organic life, but an almost apocalyptic one on electrical devices. Reports abound with telegraph poles electrocuting people, and operators being shocked trying to use them. Some reports had telegraph operators 'unplugging' their systems for safety only to have them still capable of sending and receiving messages. The telegraph in the 1850's was the extent of technology at the time. Take a moment to consider something that doesn't rely on technology today… you are using electrical technology reading this very post. So why is this relevant at all? Well back in July 2012, we were extraordinarily close to experiencing another one. This time even more powerful. We're talking a couple of days orbit back and we would have been in the direct firing line of the CME. Hypothetically (I can only speak in speculation until one occurs), if it had hit us, the first thing we would lose is our communications from the geomagnetic storm. Imagine every plane being unable to contact anyone simultaneously. Imagine every GPS crapping out, every phone-call getting disconnected all over the entire planet. What about those poor astronauts and satellites in space that would have essentially no protection and no possible contact with Earth. Depending on the power of the geomagnetic storm, we could of seen some serious ‘natures wrath’ type stuff. Embedded technologies like mobile phones and laptops would short circuit from the extreme electrical surges (regardless of whether they were turned on… remember the telegraphs), magnetic hard drives the world over would be either damaged beyond repair or corrupted beyond use. Bye bye backups of all our data, bye bye every working computer on the planet. In an even more extreme case our entire electrical grid would crap out. This includes redundancies designed to replace faulty parts. The sustained damage from a Carrington Event would take decades for us to recover from. The international community agree that an estimated cost of an impact is around $20 trillion. That estimate doesn't take into account the financial ruin from looting, crime and hunger from extreme delays in exports.