We need to talk about the sun, a vital if middle-aged dwarf star
The sun, about which we need to know more, ‘drives everything’, and there is a 12% chance over a decade of an extreme solar event striking Earth
Dallas — On the list of “bad stuff that could happen”, a huge plasma ejection from the sun is not an everyday worry, falling somewhere between an irrevocably warming climate and a shortage of soy milk in the office fridge.
Yet our star’s output plays a critical role in space weather, which carries potentially large implications for satellites, mobile phones, airlines and electrical grids — in other words, the underpinnings of 21st-century society. In March 1989, a solar storm that struck Earth zapped the grid in Quebec, Canada, causing most of the province to lose electricity and doing billions of dollars in damage...
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