At https://spaceweather.com (September 1st 2020) it would seem that on September 1st 1859 a ferocious solar storm engulfed our planet – breaching the magnetosphere, to a degree. This was the so called Carrington Event, named after solar scientist Richard Carrington, who witnessed the flare that set it in motion. Auroras reached as far south as Cuba, the Bahamas, and Hawaii, and set fire to telegraph stations etc. It is welldocumented in the West. However, it seems there were other equally potent flares that caused a problem. Hisashi Hyakawa of Japan has been studying solar diaries and has uncovered another one of equal intensity – in 1770. This was even recorded by Captain Cook from near Timor, a large island in southern Indonesia. Chinese, Korean and Japanese records exist and it looks like the sun spot was twice the size of the Carrington one.
There were also super solar storms in 1872 and 1921, not far from the severity of the Carrington Event. In 2012 NASA and ESA spacecraft picked up an extreme solar storm that erupted from the sun. It missed the earth – but not by a great deal. It may well have been stronger than Carrington but it shot past the earth. A near miss. Luck. Providence. Whatever.