Photograph of new mammal, Bassaricyon neblina "Olinguito," taken in the wild at Tandayapa Bird Lodge, Ecuador. Source Wikipedia
Our sun goes through an eleven-year cycle, from calm to stormy. Right now it's near the height of the latest one, stormy, and that's when this kind of
thing happens:
The sun unleashed a powerful storm early Tuesday morning, sending an enormous cloud of superheated particles rocketing toward Earth. The solar eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), occurred at 4:24 a.m. EDT (0824 GMT) Tuesday and blasted billions of tons of solar particles toward Earth at a mind-boggling speed of 2 million mph (3.3 million km/h).
"Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, show that the CME left the sun at speeds of around 570 miles per second, which is a fairly typical speed for CMEs," NASA officials wrote in an update today. NASA's twin Stereo spacecraft and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, captured photos of the solar storm from space.
This is actually a fairly routine CME. But sooner or later a really big one will get us in the crosshairs, it's
happened before, and how that will affect a world dependent on data flying through the air and down optical pipes remains to be seen.