Earth During a Powerful Solar Storm
Can our Sun become dangerous?
Yes, sometimes.
Every few years our
Sun
ejects a scary-large
bubble of hot gas into the
Solar System.
Every hundred years or so, when the timing, location, and
magnetic field
connections are just right, such a
Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) will hit the
Earth.
When this happens, the
Earth not only experiences dramatic auroras,
but its magnetic field gets quickly pushed back and compressed, which causes electric grids to surge.
Some of these surges could be dangerous, affecting satellites and
knocking out power grids --
which can take months to fix.
Just such a storm -- called the
Carrington Event -- occurred in
1859 and caused
telegraph wires to spark.
A similar CME passed near the Earth in 2012, and the
featured animated video shows a computer model
of what might have happened if it had been a direct hit.
In this model, the Earth's
magnetopause becomes so compressed that it went inside the orbit of
geosynchronous communication satellites.