Solar System
The Solar System's location in the Milky Way is a factor in the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Its orbit is close to circular, and orbits near the Sun are at roughly the same speed as that of the spiral arms. Therefore, the Sun passes through arms only rarely. Because spiral arms are home to a far larger concentration of supernovae, gravitational instabilities, and radiation that could disrupt the Solar System, this has given Earth long periods of stability for life to evolve. The Solar System also lies well outside the star-crowded environs of the galactic centre. Near the centre, gravitational tugs from nearby stars could perturb bodies in the Oort cloud and send many comets into the inner Solar System, producing collisions with potentially catastrophic implications for life on Earth. The intense radiation of the galactic centre could also interfere with the development of complex life. Even at the Solar System's current location, some scientists have speculated that recent supernovae may have adversely affected life in the last 35,000 years, by flinging pieces of expelled stellar core towards the Sun, as radioactive dust grains and larger, comet-like bodies.
List of solar storms
Active stars produce disturbances in space weather with the field of heliophysics the science that studies such phenomena; itself primarily an interdisciplinary combination of solar physics and planetary science (long-term space weather patterns comprise space climate). In the Solar System, the Sun can produce intense geomagnetic and energetic particle storms capable of causing severe damage to technology including but not limited to large scale power outages, disruption or blackouts of radio communications (including GPS), and temporary to permanent disabling of satellites and other spaceborne technology. Intense solar storms may also be hazardous to high-latitude, high-altitude aviation and to human spaceflight. Geomagnetic storms are the cause of auroras. The most significant known solar storm occurred in September 1859 and is known as the "Carrington event". The damage from the most potent solar storms is capable of existentially threatening the stability of modern human civilization, although proper preparedness and mitigation can substantially reduce the hazards. Proxy data from Earth, as well as analysis of stars similar to the Sun suggest that it may be capable of producing so called superflares, those which are much larger than any flares in the historical record (as much as 1000x stronger every 5000 years), but it contradicts to the models of solar flares and to the statistic of extreme solar events reconstructed using cosmogenic isotope data in terrestrial archives . The discrepancy is not yet resolved and may be related to a biased statistic of the stellar population of solar analogs Although there is proxy evidence, interpretation of such proxy data remains unresolved..