Solar storms

Solar storms are a variety of eruption of mass and energy at solar surface. Flares, sunspots, coronal mass ejections are common bearer of solar Activity. All of them are involving in sudden release of stored magnetic energy. The particles are called electrons, ions and protons. particles is controlled by the magnetic field line. They all involve sudden releases of stored magnetic energy, which accelerates the hot gases near the surface or in the corona of the Sun. Sometimes these particles make it all the way to the Earth and beyond by flowing along the Sun's magnetic field into interplanetary space. When the material collides with the Earth's magnetic field and trapped radiation belts, it can dump particles into our upper atmosphere to cause the Aurora. The same 'charged' particles can produce their own magnetic fields which can modify the Earth's magnetic field and affect compass readings. The changing magnetic fields can also 'induce' electricity in long pipelines, or produce electrical surges in our power grids leading to brown outs and black outs. Solar storms and geomagnetic storms are caused by explosions of particles from the sun, as well as the steady stream of particles called the solar wind. The aurora is caused by interactions between the Earth’s magnetic field and charged particles blasted toward us by powerful explosions in the sun’s atmosphere. What causes these solar explosions isn’t well-understood by scientists, but they often occur near big sunspots.

The aurora themselves are totally harmless, but other associated effects from a particularly large geomagnetic storm like this one include radio outages, electrical power surges, and slightly less accurate satellite navigation. A truly monstrous geomagnetic storm,

Sources: http://www.solarstorms.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm