As you go through your day, remember something important: Life on this little mote depends entirely on the mercy of a cosmic nuclear power with an itchy trigger finger.

The sun’s magnetic field originates as a series of orderly north-to-south lines. Very quickly, those lines stretch and tangle, forming magnetic knots that can puncture the surface and trap matter beneath them. The resulting patches are known as sunspots. Sometimes, the knots untangle spontaneously, violently. The sunspot turns into the muzzle of a gun: Photons flare in every direction, and a slug of magnetized plasma fires like a bullet.

The sun has played this game of Russian Roulette with the solar system for billions of years, sometimes shooting off several coronal mass ejections in a day. Most come nowhere near Earth. Most…

Read about how the next coronal mass injection could come our way, and what we could do to defend against it at the link in our bio.

🎨: @marknessofdarkness