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 satellite s.