At https://phys.org/news/2026-08-earth-magnetosphere-superstorms.html … it seems even scientists were being complacent about solar super storms. The Sun is now entering a quiet phase following the peak of the current 11 year solar period. However, the threat of a Carrington level super storm is ever present. A paper in Nature – see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10757-4 … suggests regression to the mean might be causing scientists to massively underestimate how severe solar storms might be at some point in the future. The interaction between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere can be thought of as a great dynamo. The combination of solar wind and magnetic field drives high speed plasma and electric currents into the upper atmosphere. This is particularly relevant to the polar regions. Scientists track this dynamo effect using the Polar Cap Index. During moderate solar activity there is a clear relationship between the solar wind and electric fields, and the electric response measured at the surface of the Earth. However, during stronger solar storms that relationship seems to break down as a result of saturation. The effect of the solar activity seems to cap out at at a certain level, below what would otherwise be expected. Nobody understood why this was so – but it was accepted as a safety valve, so to speak.
The authors of the paper work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre and they say that saturation may actually be an illusion caused by how the strength of solar storms is measured. They note that most solar wind measurements come from satellites that are located in the Sun – Earth Lagrange point -somewhat closer to the Sun than the Earth itself. That distance introduces uncertainty. The wind itself can change within that distance and shock fronts can introduce random errors that grow larger in extreme events. In other words, the effect of an extreme event is unknown. We will not know until one happens.
Bob Johnson, in a talk at an SIS speaker meeting, described how plasma from the solar wind, during an extreme event, could reach the surface of the Earth. Overwhelming the magnetosphere’s ability to protect Earth. See the sidebar on this web site.
At https://phys.org/news/2026-08-reveals-space-meteorites.html … this is a useful article on how lumps of space rock become meteorites as they fall through Earth’s atmosphere. The authors have studied 75 separate meteorite falls captured on video and in photographs. They identified seven distinct phases in the journey from space rock to a meteorite found on the surface. They show that melting and fragmentation rather than evaporation and ‘burning up’ controls how a rock loses mass, slows down, and ultimately strikes the ground. Scientists used to think that space rocks would evaporate from the enormous heat and brilliant light generated in collisions with the air – but this is not so.