The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began

Natural History, May, 2007 by Laurence A. Marschall

The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began by Stuart Clark Princeton University Press; $24.95

Around the time Bostonians were sitting down to Sunday dinner on August 28, 1859, all the equipment at the State Street telegraph office suddenly went dead. To the west, at the telegraph depot in Springfield, Massachusetts, a huge spark leapt from incoming wires, filling the office with acrid smoke. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, telegraph operators panicked when "streams of fire" began to burst from their receivers. As night fell, observers from Canada to the Bahamas reported intense auroral displays in the heavens, some so bright you could read newsprint out-of-doors. Compass needles swung wildly, as if the Earth itself was trembling, and nearly a week went by before the auroras disappeared and electrical communication returned to normal. Science journalist Stuart Clark calls the event "the perfect solar storm," caused by an immense ejection of electrically charged particles from the Sun. It was the most intense magnetic storm in recorded history.

Few people, however, suspected the true nature of the event at the time. A few earlier observers had reported compass disturbances that coincided with auroras. In the early 1800s the English astronomer William Herschel had noted that the price of wheat rose as the number of reported sunspots fell, suggesting that solar activity might affect climate. But the data were sketchy, and the forces that could stir up the Earth across 93 million miles of empty space were completely mysterious.

In 1859, however, one notable observer was keeping track of the Sun's activity. Richard Christopher Carrington, a wealthy amateur and member of the Royal Astronomical Society, had been carefully sketching the Sun, as it appeared through his own specially designed telescope, on every clear day since November 1853. Captivated by the idea that fundamental solar cycles might underlie the processes of nature, Carrington hoped that by systematic long-term observation he could uncover the laws that governed solar activity.

On September 1 of that year, a few days after the great magnetic storm began, he was surprised by two brilliant, white fireballs that moved across the solar surface at a speed he later calculated to be more than 400,000 miles an hour. Nothing like them had ever been seen before. In London, while traveling on business, he learned that magnetic sensors at Kew Observatory had recorded a large swing in their compasses coinciding with the fireballs on the Sun. It was the first direct evidence that solar storms generated magnetic lines of force that reached across space to Earth.

That, of course, was only the beginning of a story that continues to this day. Until the mid-1800s, astronomers had devoted themselves almost exclusively to measuring positions of objects in the sky. But the techniques of Carrington and his contemporaries gave birth to the new science of astrophysics, which can probe questions about the structure, function, and origin of the stars, planets, and the universe at large. Now the click of a mouse yields "Today's Space Weather" (www.sec.noaa.gov/today.html), which provides close-up images of the Sun in near-real-time, along with various up-to-date measurements of solar activity such as particle fluxes, auroras, and the strengths of magnetic fields. From Carrington's observations, Clark spins a lively account of seminal discoveries in spectroscopy, photography, and theoretical physics that led to the present-day understanding.

Carrington, alas, ended his own life after his marriage to a young woman led to a Gothic imbroglio of bigamy and assault. He died too soon to appreciate how much light he had brought into the world.