What is a solar storm?
Sun's Tantrums
What is a solar storm?
The Sun looks calm from here — a steady yellow circle in the sky, minding its own business. But zoom in close, and you'd see it's basically a giant ball of churning, roiling fire, constantly throwing tantrums. Sometimes those tantrums reach Earth. We call them solar storms.
The Sun isn't burning like a campfire. It's a massive nuclear reactor, fusing hydrogen atoms into helium in its core. That process releases staggering amounts of energy, which heats the outer layers into plasma — a super-hot soup of charged particles that swirl in powerful magnetic loops.
