Article:
Signs Of The
Last Times
The sun is the source of nearly all life on Earth. It will also doom our feeble planet in about 1 billion years. Until then, while the star is still technically on our side, we'll have to worry about giant storms of charged particles that it burps off its roiling, plasmatic surface. Each blast of particles — called a coronal mass ejection, or solar storm — can pack the explosive energy of thousands or even millions of nuclear bombs. If such a blast strikes Earth, the wave of particles can bend and snap the magnetic field lines of our planet, trigger powerful geomagnetic storms, and randomly induce electrical currents throughout the world.