It came from Outer Space! Yes, that’s the title of an old Sci-Fi
movie, but it’s also the solar storm that is expected to hit the
Earth today. It will be the strongest radiation storm to hit the
Earth since 2003. After years of quiet, the sun is awake and
sputtering with sunspots, flares and CMEs (Coronal Mass
Ejections). Some of this massive storminess is spewing out from
the sun and hitting us! The sun goes from quiet to stormy and
back again in an 11-year cycle. During the stormiest times, huge
magnetic fields, stretched beyond endurance snap and break. This
splatters large hunks of the solar gas and plasma out into
space. We call the snapping “solar flares”. The huge splashes of
hot, ionized gas and plasma are CMEs. The current splatter
started with a huge solar flare that exploded on Sunday, Jan. 22
at 10:59 p.m. EST. It blasted some of the sun’s atmosphere out
into space, right towards us at 4 million miles per hour.
Fortunately, the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from most of
the CME, but some part