Should We Be Worried About Solar Storms?

Solar radiation storms happen when a large-scale magnetic eruption from the sun accelerates charged particles in the solar atmosphere to very high velocities. This can cause protons to get accelerated to large fractions of the speed of light, meaning they can travel the 150 million km from the sun to the Earth in just tens of minutes. Once they reach the Earth, the rapidly moving protons break through the magnetosphere that shields Earth from lower-energy charged particles to land near the north and south poles. A major disturbance in the Earth’s…