The Early Earth Under a Super-CME Attack and Prospects For Life: 3D MHD Simulations of the Early Earth Magnetosphere with Super-CMEs

Solar eruptions, known as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), are frequently observed on our Sun. Recent observations taken with the revolutionary Kepler mission revealed thousands of exoplanets around solar-like stars.  As a by-product Kepler revealed the presence of numerous giant flares, including super-flares and super-CMEs (SCMEs), on rapidly rotating sun-like stars, with energies up to 1,000 times of the most powerful solar flare ever observed on the Sun. These stars resemble our “infant" (0.5 Myr) Sun. We show that SCMEs with the energy of 3 times the energy of the Sept 1-2, 1959 Carrington event  were hitting the Earth’s magnetosphere with a frequency of ~1 event per  day!  How would such frequent “perfect" superstorms impact the early Earth’s atmosphere and living forms on its surface? We have performed a 3D global magnetohydrodynamic simulation of the magnetic interaction of such a SCME cloud with the early Earth's magnetosphere. We calculated the global structure of the perturbed magnetosphere and derived the latitude of the open-closed magnetic field boundary. We also estimated energy fluxes penetrating the Earth’s ionosphere and discussed the consequences of energetic particle fluxes and EUV-UV emission from the early Sun on biological systems on early Earth. We conclude that super-flares and SCMEs are capable of wiping out most of the primitive life forms on the Earth’s surface within ~ 0.5 billion years after the origin of Earth. We also show that interactions with frequent SCMEs can provide additional energy input into the early Earth’s atmosphere sufficient to resolve the faint young Sun paradox.