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What would you do if the power went out? Our lives are increasingly reliant on technology; our work and our social lives often require access to the internet. Lights, televisions, and refrigerators require electricity to run. These devices, and the power grid as a whole, are subject to a major threat society is not totally prepared for: the Sun’s bad behavior.��

“Our Sun is naturally a magnetically active star, and it’s really pretty well behaved compared to other stars. But it does have fits, it does become prickly,” said Delores Knipp, an atmospheric scientist at the ���񱦵�. On February 19 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting, she and other experts discussed how often space weather — the disturbances originating from the Sun, also known as solar storms — happens, and how it affects life on Earth.

The intensity of the Sun’s activity ebbs and flows over an 11-year pattern, known as the solar cycle. The Sun is approaching the current cycle’s maximum level, with the greatest amount of solar activity expected between 2023 and 2026. When a solar storm reaches Earth, the energetic particles spiral along the planet’s magnetic field lines, cascading toward the poles where they interact with the atmosphere and create a spectacular show in the northern and southern lights. Solar storms can also have other far-reaching effects such as changing the density of the upper atmosphere —��which aerospace company SpaceX discovered last month when a small solar storm caused its satellites to encounter more atmospheric drag, falling out of the sky and burning up in Earth’s atmosphere.