Lost Indian Observatory Records Reveal Hidden Phases of the Carrington Superstorm

More than 165 years after the most violent space weather event ever recorded, a cache of long-forgotten handwritten magnetometer records from southern India is rewriting the story of the Carrington storm of 1859. Researchers R. Jayakrishnan and Fazil C K of the Astronomical Observatory, University of Kerala, together with Ajesh A of the Department of Physics, University of Kerala, have recovered and analyzed bifilar magnetometer data from the Trivandrum Observatory, preserved within the historical archives of the National Library of Scotland. Their study, published in Astrophysics and Space Science, reconstructs a multi-phase chronology of the great storm and reveals that the famous superstorm of 2 September 1859 was not an isolated catastrophe but the climax of a sustained barrage of solar eruptions that battered Earth’s magnetic defenses throughout August and September of that year.

The Carrington storm takes its name from the English astronomer Richard Carrington, who on 1 September 1859 sketched a singular, brilliant white-light flare on the Sun, an observation independently confirmed by Richard Hodgson. Within roughly seventeen hours, the coronal mass ejection associated with that flare slammed into Earth’s magnetosphere, igniting auroras visible as far south as the Caribbean and Hawaii and disrupting telegraph communications across the world. For decades, estimates of the storm’s intensity have rested heavily on a single near-equatorial record from the Colaba Observatory in Bombay, and scientists have repeatedly cautioned that the intensity estimates derived from that record carry substantial uncertainty. The new Trivandrum data provide an independent equatorial vantage point, located close to the magnetic equator, and thereby offer a rare second witness to one of the most extreme geomagnetic disturbances in recorded history.

The instrument at the heart of the discovery is the bifilar magnetometer, a device in which a magnet is suspended by two parallel wires so that changes in the horizontal component of Earth’s magnetic field cause measurable rotations of the suspended system. John Allan Broun, the Scottish physicist who directed the Trivandrum Observatory under the patronage of the Maharajah of Travancore, was among the pioneers of this technique and published foundational work on the instrument’s errors and corrections in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1862. His meticulous handwritten logs, correspondence, and papers, catalogued under accession 10064/1-172 at the National Library of Scotland, record hourly readings of the horizontal magnetic intensity at Trivandrum through the critical weeks of 1859. By digitizing and calibrating these archival entries, the research team converted the historical readings into modern nanotesla units, producing a quantitative record of geomagnetic disturbance at a latitude where the equatorial electrojet, an intense east-west current flowing in the ionosphere above the magnetic equator, strongly shapes the local magnetic field.

The analysis yielded a striking and unexpected result: the disturbance recorded at Trivandrum on 29 August 1859 was nearly as severe as the celebrated Carrington storm itself. The team measured a depression in the horizontal magnetic field intensity of approximately 1,851 nanotesla for the 29 August event, compared with approximately 1,926 nanotesla for the 2 September superstorm. In other words, the pre-Carrington storm of late August was of comparable magnitude to the event that has long defined the upper limit of space weather severity. This finding positions the 29 August disturbance as a newly calibrated benchmark for coronal mass ejection activity preceding the main storm, and it suggests that the Sun was already in an extraordinarily eruptive state days before Carrington pointed his telescope at the sunspot region that produced the historic flare.

The chronology that emerges from the Trivandrum records is one of repeated blows rather than a single punch. The data reveal geomagnetic disturbances in response to likely coronal mass ejection impacts on 16 August and 29 August, preceding the main event of 2 September. After the superstorm, the magnetosphere did not immediately settle. The records show further magnetospheric disturbances on 5 September, 13 September, and 15 September, which the researchers attribute to weaker coronal mass ejection events and/or high-speed solar wind streams arriving in the aftermath of the main activity. This pattern of successive impacts is consistent with the modern understanding that active solar regions can launch multiple eruptions over days or weeks, each compressing Earth’s magnetic shield and driving currents through the magnetosphere and ionosphere.

A particularly telling signature in the archival data is the disruption of the normal diurnal periodicity of the horizontal magnetic field intensity on 16 August, 5 September, 13 September, and 15 September. Under quiet conditions, the horizontal field at a near-equatorial station follows a regular daily cycle driven largely by the equatorial electrojet, which strengthens during daylight hours as solar heating and tidal winds drive ionospheric currents. When interplanetary coronal mass ejections strike the magnetosphere, magnetic reconnection at the magnetopause, the process by which interplanetary magnetic field lines merge with terrestrial field lines and transfer solar wind energy into the magnetosphere, injects particles and energy into the ring current, a torus of charged particles encircling Earth. The intensification of this ring current weakens the horizontal magnetic field at low latitudes, producing the characteristic negative excursions in the H component that magnetometers record as storms. The Trivandrum logs show exactly this kind of breakdown of the regular daily rhythm, underscoring the magnetospheric fluctuations induced by successive interplanetary coronal mass ejection impacts.

The physical framework for interpreting these observations draws on decades of magnetospheric research. The concept of geomagnetic storms as ring current phenomena was formalized in the widely cited definition by Gonzalez and colleagues in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1994, and subsequent studies of ring current energy input and decay by Kozyra and Liemohn, and of ring current ion energy density evolution based on Van Allen Probes measurements by Zhao and colleagues, have clarified how storm-time currents build and dissipate. Reconnection physics, from Dungey’s seminal 1961 model linking the interplanetary magnetic field to the auroral zones through modern analyses of magnetopause reconnection location, explains how the orientation of the arriving solar wind magnetic field governs the efficiency of energy transfer. The Trivandrum data, though recorded with nineteenth-century instrumentation, capture the integrated low-latitude response of this entire coupled system, which is precisely why independent equatorial records are so valuable to space weather historians.

The significance of the new work extends beyond historical curiosity. Modern technological civilization is far more vulnerable to extreme space weather than the telegraph age was: power grids, satellite constellations, GPS navigation, aviation routes over the poles, and radio communications all depend on conditions in near-Earth space. Estimates of the upper limits of geomagnetic storm intensity feed directly into engineering standards and risk assessments for critical infrastructure. Recent scholarship, including Love and colleagues’ 2024 reassessment in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, has emphasized that the intensity of the 1859 Carrington storm remains uncertain, and that the field needs more independent records to constrain the true worst case. Every newly recovered historical dataset narrows that uncertainty. The Trivandrum measurements, by confirming a near-Carrington-class storm on 29 August 1859, demonstrate that storms approaching the most extreme known intensity may occur more frequently than single-event statistics suggest, a conclusion with direct implications for how often infrastructure planners should expect once-in-a-century events.

The recovery of the records is itself a story of scientific detective work and international collaboration. The researchers acknowledge the support of the National Library of Scotland in retrieving the handwritten notes of John Allan Broun, and the visit was facilitated by Dr. Anna Szolucha of Jagiellonian University under a project supported by the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences. The work was funded by the Indian National Science Academy through project HS/RC/233. The study builds on the team’s earlier research, published in Advances in Space Research in 2025, which first unraveled the detection of the Carrington storm from Trivandrum’s historical magnetic declination observations, and on their documentation of the observatory’s 162-year engagement with the magnetic equator. Together, these efforts are restoring the Travancore Observatory, one of the colonial-era scientific institutions of India, to its rightful place in the history of geomagnetism.

As space agencies deploy fleets of monitors at the Lagrange points and improve models of coronal mass ejection propagation, the 1859 event remains the touchstone against which all space weather preparedness is measured. The Trivandrum chronology now shows that the Carrington storm was a multi-phase affair, a two-week siege of the terrestrial magnetosphere bracketed by disturbances nearly as fierce as the main event. In the delicate ink strokes of a Victorian magnetometer log, preserved by chance in a Scottish archive, scientists have found a warning written across a century and a half: the Sun is capable of sustained, storm-after-storm violence, and Earth’s defenses are tested not once but repeatedly when the star enters its most eruptive moods.

Subject of Research: A multi-phase reconstruction of the 1859 Carrington geomagnetic storm using archival bifilar magnetometer records from Trivandrum Observatory

Article Title: A multi-phase chronology of the Carrington storm of 1859 based on archival records of Trivandrum observatory

Article References: Jayakrishnan, R., C K, F., & A, A. (2026). A multi-phase chronology of the Carrington storm of 1859 based on archival records of Trivandrum observatory. Astrophysics and Space Science, 371(9), Article 105. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-026-04634-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10509-026-04634-9

Keywords: Carrington storm, space weather, geomagnetic storm, Trivandrum observatory, bifilar magnetometer, coronal mass ejection, magnetosphere, ring current, solar flare, magnetic equator, history of science, John Allan Broun