The Sun Could Delete The Internet
Our digital world isn’t as safe as you might think.
Our lives revolve around the internet. We work, catch up with friends, go shopping, consume media and now even have internet-based currency and virtual worlds thanks to cryptocurrency and the metaverse. It seems set in stone that we will become increasingly reliant on this information superhighway. But something may take this digital world away from us, the Sun. That’s right, the giant burning ball of hydrogen and helium that is the basis for almost all life on Earth could one day delete the internet. But how?
From Earth, it may seem like the Sun is just a homologous bright disk. But in reality the surface of the Sun is full of hot spots, gargantuan arching plasma and ultra-strong fluctuating magmatic fields. In fact, sometimes the magnetic field is so strong that a vast amount of super hot ionised plasma is ejected from the Sun and flung out into space. We call these solar temper tantrums Coronal Mass Ejections (CME).
Most of these CMEs fall back to the Sun or are pointed away from Earth. However, sometimes, they can travel far enough to hit Earth. It won’t cook Earth, but this is…
