There is a lot of misleading or just plain false information out there when it comes to the topics of astronomy and space. Conspiracy theories have been on the rise over the past several years and don’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. This FAQ is updated frequently as new stories come out.
If you don’t know what a Carrington Event is, you’re probably not worried about one. With the Sun being at solar maximum throughout 2024-2025, we’ve seen a lot of large solar events that have produced aurora as far south as Mexico. But the likelihood that we could soon experience another Carrington event is miniscule; approximately 1.9%, in fact.
A Carrington Event takes its name from the astronomer who observed this type of Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that occurred in 1859, Richard Carrington. According to the units of measure we have today for solar activity, this one would have “buried the needle”, so to speak. It was so powerful that aurora was seen all over the globe. It sparked fires, caused telegraph outages, caused ship compasses to fail, and generally scared the wits out of everyone who witnessed it. In northern latitudes the aurora were so bright that birds thought it was morning and began to chirp. If you want to read more about the original Carrington event, click here.
Conspiracy theorists and people with very little understanding of solar events have been posting about a “high probability” of a Carrington Event happening soon due to the Sun being at its peak cycle. This would indeed cause major damage to our electronic infrastructure, if it were to occur. But any predictions of said event are not true and the people who post these things are just baiting you for views and clicks. To borrow a quote Stacker Pentecost from ‘Pacific Rim’, “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!”
Can an event of this magnitude happen? As we said before, there’s a 1.9% chance of it. Another study found that there’s an estimated 0.7% probability of a Carrington Event each calendar year. An event that size would be catastrophic, especially since we have so much more electronic technology that we depend on now, but due to the rare nature it cannot be predicted. Anyone who says they can is lying to you.
For more information on the scientific research that has been done on Carrington Event probability, you can read about it in this EarthSky article.
Any of these conspiracy theories can be researched and debunked with a minimal amount of Internet searching. Educate yourself. Science is real.
Unless you hear it direct from scientists and world governments, these claims are 100% false, misleading, and/or clickbait. Think about it very carefully. If this were real, it would most likely be one of the following scenarios:
It’s going to happen in the very near future, there’s nothing we can do about it, and it’s an extinction level event. Would it be to the benefit of world leaders or humanity to share this information and induce the inevitable panic, death, and destruction it most certainly would cause?
It’s going to happen farther in the future and the best scientists and government resources will be put into action to try and prevent it. In this case world leaders would most likely control the flow of information and release it in a methodical way to try and reduce panic and price gouging that would inevitably happen.
It’s going to happen several generations in the future. In most cases these types of discoveries can’t be predicted with a high level of accuracy. The closest example is Apophis, a 1000-foot-wide asteroid that will pass within 30,000 miles of Earth in less than a decade. “Pass within” is the key phrase here. There’s no current evidence that Apophis will impact Earth. A more distant possibility is asteroid Bennu, which could possibly slip into Earth’s orbit and impact in 2182.
Asteroids have hit the Earth before, like the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. In a universe as big as ours, impacts are a known occurrence. Our own Moon is littered with craters from impacts of all sizes, and in fact we’ve actually caught images of impacts there as they happen. We should, of course, always be researching and improving our science around asteroid impacts and possible ways to prevent them. But individually we do things every day that are statistically more likely to unalive us - we drive to work, fly to far away destinations, eat food that may be carrying e-coli or other dangerous bacteria, refuse to wear masks during a pandemic…. 🙄
Don’t fall for clickbait! Think critically! The announcement about a humanity-ending asteroid is probably not going to come from sources that you might normally trust for information, such as news networks or pop science and technology websites. They’re just as prone to clickbait headlines as anyone these days. And such an announcement definitely won’t come from a TikToker with a name like YeetYoMama69.
“That’s not the Sun. That’s a fried egg.”
“The Moon is made of plasma.”
“The Moon is a superstructure.”
“That’s not Saturn. You’re just showing a picture.”