The following passage is adapted from an essay on nineteenth-century astronomical history:
In the late morning of September 1, 1859, thirty-three-year-old amateur astronomer Richard Carrington stood inside his private observatory at Redhill, Surrey. Carrington was engaged in his routine daily task of projecting an image of the sun through a telescope onto a glass screen, meticulously tracing the size and alignment of sunspot groups. At 11:18 a.m., while sketching a particularly massive cluster of sunspots that spanned an area several times larger than Earth, Carrington witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon. Two blinding beams of intense white light suddenly erupted from within the sunspot group. Fearing that a light beam had penetrated his apparatus through a broken filter, Carrington adjusted his equipment, but quickly realized he was observing an extraordinary solar event.
The white-light flare, which reached its peak intensity within five seconds, traveled across the sunspot region before fading entirely after approximately five minutes. Carrington recorded that the bright spots moved a distance of nearly 35,000 miles during their brief duration. Recognizing the historical gravity of the sight, he rushed out of the observatory to find a witness to corroborate his discovery. Upon returning barely sixty seconds later with a companion, Carrington was disappointed to find that the intense illumination had almost entirely subsided, leaving only faint remnants of the eruption.
Unbeknownst to Carrington, at the exact moment he witnessed the optical flare, the magnetic needles at the Kew Observatory in London—connected to self-recording magnetographs designed by Balfour Stewart—began to oscillate violently. This geomagnetic disturbance heralded what would become known as the Carrington Event, the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history. Less than eighteen hours later, a massive coronal mass ejection struck Earth's magnetosphere, triggering vivid auroral displays visible as far south as Hawaii, Cuba, and Santiago, Chile.
The atmospheric disruption severely affected global communications. Telegraph systems across North America and Europe suffered catastrophic failures. Electric currents induced in telegraph wires by the geomagnetic storm were so potent that operators reported receiving electric shocks, and spark discharges ignited telegraph paper in several stations. Remarkably, some telegraph circuits continued to transmit and receive messages even after operators disconnected the primary batteries powering the equipment, operating purely on the sky-generated current flowing through the ground wires.
Following the event, Carrington published his detailed findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Although he carefully noted the coincidence between his optical solar observation and the simultaneous magnetic perturbation at Kew, Carrington remained characteristically cautious in his conclusions. He explicitly warned against concluding a definitive cause-and-effect relationship based on a single instance, famously remarking that "one swallow does not make a summer." Nevertheless, his meticulous documentation laid the groundwork for modern space weather science, proving that solar surface activities directly influence Earth's electromagnetic environment.
Based on the passage, evaluate the truth of the following statement:
According to the passage, when Richard Carrington returned to his observatory with a witness sixty seconds after leaving, the white-light solar flare had completely disappeared, leaving no visible trace.
Answer: Answer