Solar Magnetic Storm Narrowly Missed Earth in July 2012 [VIDEO]

Magnetized plasma from a solar storm barely missed Earth on July 23, 2012. If the eruption had occurred nine days earlier it would have created large-scale havoc and disruption in our electric grid, according to a new finding.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, along with Chinese researchers reveal that NASA's STEREO spacecraft detected coronal mass ejections -intense solar bursts- last July.

 But the researchers say that if the eruption had occurred nine days earlier, the event would have triggered havoc as the ignition spot of the solar surface was facing the Earth during that period. The emission would have hit the planet and triggered havoc in the electrical grid, eventually disabling all satellites and GPS. Most importantly it would have disrupted our electronic lives.

 The event would have been similar to the largest magnetic storm the Earth ever witnessed, called the Carrington event of 1859, when the solar bursts surrounded Earth in magnetic fireworks. In the 1859 event, the magnetized plasma destroyed the dominant mode of communication-the Telegraph system- across the U.S..

The study included former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow and research physicist Ying D. Liu, now a professor at China's State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, UC Berkeley research physicist Janet G. Luhmann and colleagues.

"Had it hit Earth, it probably would have been like the big one in 1859, but the effect today, with our modern technologies, would have been tremendous," Luhmann, who is part of the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Observatory) team and based at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, said in a news release.

A solar storm similar to the Carrington Event would cost $2.6 trillion globally. They also determined that the massive outburst was from a minimum of two CME that occurred simultaneously. The magnetic burst brushed through the solar wind at high speed. Apart from the high speed they produced long duration southward-oriented magnetic field.

"These gnarly, twisty ropes of magnetic field from coronal mass ejections come blasting from the sun through the ambient solar system, piling up material in front of them and when this double whammy hits Earth, it skews the Earth's magnetic field  to odd directions, dumping energy all around the planet," Luhmann said.

These finding were possible due to the STEREO A and STEREO B spacecraft, whose aim is understand how the sun emits massive solar flares and also to precisely predict them during the sun's 11-year solar cycle.

"Observations of solar superstorms have been extremely lacking and limited, and our current understanding of solar superstorms is very poor," Liu said. "Questions fundamental to solar physics and space weather, such as how extreme events form and evolve and how severe it can be at the Earth, are not addressed because of the extreme lack of observations."

The paper is documented in the journal Nature Communications.