Solar Maximum

The Sun is our life force. Every second, it showers our planet with light and heat. Traveling 93 million miles, it reaches Earth in just over eight minutes. Though its light is nurturing and healing, on the surface, the Sun is a sphere of plasma filaments and nuclear fire.

Waxing and waning on an 11-year cycle—the Sun’s activity peaks at solar maximum. As the Sun’s poles flip, its magnetic fields twist into knots that eventually snap, unleashing geomagnetic and radiation storms, launching torrents of energy towards Earth—protons, electrons, and solar wind at 600 miles per second.

On the left, the illustration shows a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) on the Sun. Two to four days after the blast, the CME cloud is shown striking and deflected around the Earth’s magnetosphere. The blue paths emanating from the Earth’s poles represent some of its magnetic field lines. Credit: NASA/GSFC/SOHO/ESA

Anatomy of the Sun

This star contains 99.86% of all mass in our solar system. The core is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, a nuclear cauldron fusing hydrogen into helium.

Above the core lies the radiative zone, where photons take thousands of years to reach the surface, and the convective zone, where boiling plasma churns like a vast ocean, generating magnetic fields that fuel flares and sunspots.

These magnetic fields stretch and snap, launching solar flares—intense bursts of radiation —and CMEs, which take a bit longer but are far more powerful, capable of causing geomagnetic storms that ripple through Earth's magnetosphere and even shift auroras toward the equator.

Fairbanks, Alaska
photo by @VincentLedvina

Fairbanks, Alaska
photo by @VincentLedvina

One such storm occurred in October 2024, when a powerful CME unleashed a G4-class geomagnetic storm. Auroras danced as far south as Seattle and Pennsylvania.