Tree Rings Offer Insight Into Mysterious, Devastating Radiation Storms - SciTechDaily

New airy has been shed connected a mysterious, unpredictable, and perchance devastating benignant of astrophysical event, acknowledgment to a University of Queensland (UQ) study.

A squad of researchers, led by Dr. Benjamin Pope from UQ’s School of Mathematics and Physics, applied cutting-edge statistic to information from millennia-old trees, to find retired much astir radiation ‘storms’.

“These immense bursts of cosmic radiation, known arsenic Miyake Events, person occurred astir erstwhile each 1000 years but what causes them is unclear,” Dr. Pope said.

“The starring mentation is that they are immense star flares. We request to cognize more, due to the fact that if 1 of these happened today, it would destruct exertion including satellites, net cables, long-distance powerfulness lines, and transformers.

“The effect connected planetary infrastructure would beryllium unimaginable.”

Enter the humble histrion ring.

First writer Qingyuan Zhang, a UQ undergraduate mathematics student, developed bundle to analyse each disposable portion of information connected histrion rings.

“Because you tin number a tree’s rings to place its age, you tin besides observe humanities cosmic events going backmost thousands of years,” Mr Zhang said.

“When radiation strikes the ambiance it produces radioactive carbon-14, which filters done the air, oceans, plants, and animals, and produces an yearly grounds of radiation successful histrion rings.

“We modeled the planetary c rhythm to reconstruct the process implicit a 10,000-year period, to summation penetration into the standard and quality of the Miyake Events.”

The communal mentation until present has been that Miyake Events are elephantine star flares.

“But our results situation this,” Mr. Zhang said. “We’ve shown they’re not correlated with sunspot activity, and immoderate really past 1 oregon 2 years.

“Rather than a azygous instantaneous detonation oregon flare, what we whitethorn beryllium looking astatine is simply a benignant of astrophysical ‘storm’ oregon outburst.”

Dr. Pope said the information scientists don’t cognize precisely what Miyake Events are, oregon however to foretell their occurrence is precise disturbing.

“Based connected disposable data, there’s astir a 1 percent accidental of seeing different 1 wrong the adjacent decade. But we don’t cognize however to foretell it oregon what harms it whitethorn cause.

“These likelihood are rather alarming, and laic the instauration for further research.”

The probe is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Reference: “Modelling cosmic radiation events successful the tree-ring radiocarbon record” by Qingyuan Zhang, Utkarsh Sharma, Jordan A. Dennis, Andrea Scifo, Margot Kuitems, Ulf Büntgen, Mathew J. Owens, Michael W. Dee and Benjamin J. S. Pope , Proceedings of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences.
DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2022.0497

The survey was besides completed with undergraduate maths and physics students Utkarsh Sharma and Jordan Dennis.

The enactment was supported by a philanthropic donation to UQ from the Big Questions Institut.