What's the weather like in space? A new mission seeks to find out

Esa is launching a solar mission that could help forecast potentially catastrophic events

On the morning of 1 September 1859, the English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed something strange on the surface of the sun: two patches of intensely white light erupting from a cluster of dark sunspots. Five minutes later, they vanished.

Later that night, bright aurora lit the Earth's sky as far south as Havana and Honolulu. Around the world, telegraph communications failed, some of them bursting into flames.