By Ashley Strickland, CNN
(CNN) — When solar storms erupt from the sun and reach Earth, their intensity is measured against a historical benchmark: the Carrington Event. Now, a portrait of 19th century British solar astronomer Richard Carrington has been discovered — providing, at long last, an image of the man for whom the event was named.
On September 1, 1859, powerful electric current surges delivered electric shocks to operators in telegraph stations and even sparked fires in their offices. Some telegraph machines received messages that didn’t make sense, while others sent messages despite not being plugged in, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Incredibly bright auroras, typically seen in northern climes such as Norway and Alaska, danced across the sky as far south as Panama.
The event remains the most intense geomagnetic storm — a major disturbance of Earth’s magnetic field due to solar activity — ever recorded.
At the time, the effects of solar activity on Earth, called space weather, were not known.
Carrington had observed a large solar flare erupt from the sun the day before — the first solar flare ever witnessed and recorded. He spotted the bright flare while using a telescope to project the sun’s image onto a screen.
Although colleague Richard Hodgson also observed the flare, Carrington made what is considered the first direct link between solar and geomagnetic activity — the flare and the ensuing storm that arrived on Earth 17 hours later, said Mark Miesch, a research scientist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
“That link later gave birth to the science of space weather,” Miesch said. “Richard Carrington witnessed the awesome power of the sun like nobody else before or since.”
Despite his major contributions to solar physics, Carrington is not well-known, and researchers suspect that’s partly because there hasn’t been a face to go with his name.
Now, the detective work of Kate Bond, an assistant archivist at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, has uncovered the first and perhaps only known photograph of Carrington 150 years after his death.
A missing portrait
The Royal Astronomical Society archives contain Carrington’s original observations of sunspots from 1853 to 1861, which are some of the most requested for viewing because they contain his drawing of the 1859 solar flare.
But researchers wanting to see a photo of Carrington have been out of luck because none was on record, Bond said.
Bond became interested in Carrington after reading Stuart Clark’s “The Sun Kings.” In the book, Clark mentions that he wished he could see a portrait of Carrington. A 2021 research paper authored by Royal Astronomical Society fellows also mentioned the hunt for the astronomer’s picture.
Even online searches didn’t turn up a likeness — except for an erroneous photo belonging to British mathematician Lord Kelvin taken around 1900, more than two decades after Carrington’s death.
Bond and Hisashi Hayakawa, assistant professor at Nagoya University’s Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research in Japan, discussed what a lost Carrington portrait might look like during Hayakawa’s visit to the society’s library for separate research in June.
Like other scientists at the time, Carrington was a member of the Literary and Scientific Portrait Club, Bond said. And all members were required to have a portrait taken at the Maull & Polyblank studio in London. The club operated between 1854 and 1865 when photography was in its infancy.
The National Portrait Gallery has a list of club members, which includes Carrington’s name as well as hi