Wrath Of The Sun

Just because Summer is over, it doesn't mean that mother nature isn't still trying to find fiendish ways of killing us all and so while we are not looking, the Sun moves into the peak of its activity cycle and threatens to splat us with a mass coronal ejection. Typical.
Experts in these things are warning that the Earth is at greater risk from solar storms which fire magnetically-charged plasma at us with unpleasant results.
The space weather specialists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory warned: 'Governments are taking it very seriously. These things may be very rare but when they happen, the consequences can be catastrophic.'
Such is the worry over what the Sun is planning to spit at us at some point over the next 24 months that solar storms have been added to the national risk registers used for disaster planning, alongside other events like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
Although coronal mass ejections sounds like one of those films that should come in brown paper bags and be carried by shifty looking men in raincoats, it's actually one of the things that is going to end life on Earth or more likely make our televisions flicker a bit.
Scientists are watching closely for x-flares, which the man with all the pens in his top pocket said was the most intense sort.
Here comes the science bit: When the ejection is directed towards the Earth and reaches it as an interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection (ICME), the shock wave of the traveling mass of Solar Energetic Particles causes a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt the Earth's magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side magnetic tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the night side, it releases power on the order of the terawatt scale, which is directed back toward the Earth's upper atmosphere.
Most at risk from the millions of tons of gas racing through space at us is the Worlds electricity grids, Canada's power network was fried in 1989 by a solar flare and millions were left without electricity for nine hours.
The largest solar flare was in 1859 and caused fires in the United States and Europe as it travelled along the telegraph wires and exploded the equipment at the end of the wires.
The silver lining is that the coronal ejection causes brilliant aurora borealis as far south as Italy so we may all be fried but we will go out with the prettiest view imaginable. Which is nice.