Tree rings offer insight into devastating radiation storms

A College of Queensland research has shed new mild on a mysterious, unpredictable and doubtlessly devastating sort of astrophysical occasion.

A staff led by Dr. Benjamin Pope from UQ’s College of Arithmetic and Physics utilized innovative statistics to information from millennia-old timber, to seek out out extra about radiation “storms.”

“These big bursts of cosmic radiation, often known as Miyake Occasions, have occurred roughly as soon as each thousand years, however what causes them is unclear,” Dr. Pope stated.

“The main concept is that they’re big solar flares. We have to know extra, as a result of if one in every of these occurred right this moment, it might destroy expertise together with satellites, web cables, long-distance energy strains and transformers. The impact on world infrastructure could be unimaginable.”

Enter the standard tree ring.

First creator Qingyuan Zhang, a UQ undergraduate math scholar, developed software program to research each obtainable piece of knowledge on tree rings.

“As a result of you’ll be able to depend a tree’s rings to determine its age, you may also observe historic cosmic occasions going again hundreds of years,” Mr. Zhang stated. “When radiation strikes the ambiance, it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters by the air, oceans, vegetation, and animals, and produces an annual file of radiation in tree rings. We modeled the global carbon cycle to reconstruct the method over a ten,000-year interval, to achieve perception into the size and nature of the Miyake Occasions.”

The widespread concept till now has been that Miyake Occasions are large solar flares.

“However our outcomes problem this,” Mr. Zhang stated. “We have proven they don’t seem to be correlated with sunspot exercise, and a few really final one or two years. Somewhat than a single instantaneous explosion or flare, what we could also be taking a look at is a sort of astrophysical ‘storm’ or outburst.”

Dr. Pope stated the actual fact scientists do not know precisely what Miyake Occasions are, or tips on how to predict their prevalence, may be very disturbing.

“Primarily based on obtainable information, there’s roughly a one % likelihood of seeing one other one inside the subsequent decade. However we do not know tips on how to predict it or what harms it might trigger. These odds are fairly alarming, and lay the inspiration for additional analysis,” he concluded.

The analysis is revealed in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, and was accomplished with assist from undergraduate math and physics college students Utkarsh Sharma and Jordan Dennis.