Confirmed: Two prominent physicists reveal in a new report that enormous solar blasts with an electromagnetic pulse powerful enough to cause $2.6 trillion in damage and knock out electricity and communications for up to 10 years narrowly missed Earth in 2012.

The scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and China’s State Key Laboratory of Space Weather in their report published in the journal Nature Communications said it would have equaled the famous 1859 “Carrington event,” the world’s worst, that melted telegraph lines.