Technologies

The Sun’s Temper Tantrums: What You Should Know About Solar Storms

Solar storms are associated with the lovely aurora borealis, but they can have negative impacts, too.

Last month, Earth was treated to a massive aurora borealis that reached as far south as Texas. The event was attributed to a solar storm that lasted nearly a full day and will likely contend for the strongest of 2026. Such solar storms are usually fun for people on Earth, as we are protected from solar radiation by our planet’s atmosphere, so we can just enjoy the gorgeous greens and pretty purples in the night sky.

But solar storms are a lot more than just the aurora borealis we see, and sometimes they can cause real damage. There are several examples of this in recorded history, with the earliest being the Carrington Event, a solar storm that took place on Sept. 1, 1859. It remains the strongest solar storm ever recorded, where the world’s telegraph machines became overloaded with energy from it, causing them to shock their operators, send ghost messages and even catch on fire.

Things have changed a lot since the mid-1800s, and while today’s technology is a lot more resistant to solar radiation than it once was, a solar storm of that magnitude could still cause a lot of damage.

What is a solar storm?

A solar storm is a catchall term that describes any disturbance in the sun that involves the violent ejection of solar material into space. This can come in the form of coronal mass ejections, where clouds of plasma are ejected from the sun, or solar flares, which are concentrated bursts of electromagnetic radiation (aka light).

A sizable percentage of solar storms don’t hit Earth, and the sun is always belching material into space, so minor solar storms are quite common. The only ones humans tend to talk about are the bigger ones that do hit the Earth. When this happens, it causes geomagnetic storms, where solar material interacts with the Earth’s magnetic fields, and the excitations can cause issues in everything from the power grid to satellite functionality. It’s not unusual to hear “solar storm” and “geomagnetic storm” used interchangeably, since solar storms cause geomagnetic storms.

Solar storms ebb and flow on an 11-year cycle known as the solar cycle. NASA scientists announced that the sun was at the peak of its most recent 11-year cycle in 2024, and, as such, solar storms have been more frequent. The sun will metaphorically chill out over time, and fewer solar storms will happen until the cycle repeats.

This cycle has been stable for hundreds of millions of years and was first observed in the 18th century by astronomer Christian Horrebow.

How strong can a solar storm get?

The Carrington Event is a standout example of just how strong a solar storm can be, and such events are exceedingly rare. A rating system didn’t exist back then, but it would have certainly maxed out on every chart that science has today.

We currently gauge solar storm strength on four different scales.

The first rating that a solar storm gets is for the material belched out of the sun. Solar flares are graded using the Solar Flare Classification System, a logarithmic intensity scale that starts with B-class at the lowest end, and then increases to C, M and finally X-class at the strongest. According to NASA, the scale goes up indefinitely and tends to get finicky at higher levels. The strongest solar flare measured was in 2003, and it overloaded the sensors at X17 and was eventually estimated to be an X45-class flare.

CMEs don’t have a named measuring system, but are monitored by satellites and measured based on the impact they have on the Earth’s geomagnetic field.

Once the material hits Earth, NOAA uses three other scales to determine how strong the storm was and which systems it may impact. They include:

Geomagnetic storm (G1-G5): This scale measures how much of an impact the solar material is having on Earth’s geomagnetic field. Stronger storms can impact the power grid, electronics and voltage systems.
Solar radiation storm (S1-S5): This measures the amount of solar radiation present, with stronger storms increasing exposure to astronauts in space and to people in high-flying aircraft. It also describes the storm’s impact on satellite functionality and radio communications.
Radio blackouts (R1-R5): Less commonly used but still very important. A higher R-rating means a greater impact on GPS satellites and high-frequency radios, with the worst case being communication and navigation blackouts.

Solar storms also cause auroras by exciting the molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, which then light up as they “calm down,” per NASA. The strength and reach of the aurora generally correlate with the strength of the storm. G1 storms rarely cause an aurora to reach further south than Canada, while a G5 storm may be visible as far south as Texas and Florida. The next time you see a forecast calling for a big aurora, you can assume a big solar storm is on the way.

How dangerous is a solar storm?

The overwhelming majority of solar storms are harmless. Science has protections against the effects of solar storms that it did not have back when telegraphs were catching on fire, and most solar storms are small and don’t pose any threat to people on the surface since the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the worst of it.

That isn’t to say that they pose no threats. Humans may be exposed to ionizing radiation (the bad kind of radiation) if flying at high altitudes, which includes astronauts in space. NOAA says that this can happen with an S2 or higher storm, although location is really important here. Flights that go over the polar caps during solar storms are far more susceptible than your standard trip from Chicago to Houston, and airliners have a whole host of rules to monitor space weather, reroute flights and monitor long-term radiation exposure for flight crews to minimize potential cancer risks.

Larger solar storms can knock quite a few systems out of whack. NASA says that powerful storms can impact satellites, cause radio blackouts, shut down communications, disrupt GPS and cause damaging power fluctuations in the power grid. That means everything from high-frequency radio to cellphone reception could be affected, depending on the severity.

A good example of this is the Halloween solar storms of 2003. A series of powerful solar flares hit Earth on Oct. 28-31, causing a solar storm so massive that loads of things went wrong. Most notably, airplane pilots had to change course and lower their altitudes due to the radiation wreaking havoc on their instruments, and roughly half of the world’s satellites were entirely lost for a few days.

A paper titled Flying Through Uncertainty was published about the Halloween storms and the troubles they caused. Researchers note that 59% of all satellites orbiting Earth at the time suffered some sort of malfunction, like random thrusters going offline and some shutting down entirely. Over half of the Earth’s satellites were lost for days, requiring around-the-clock work from NASA and other space agencies to get everything back online and located.

Earth hasn’t experienced a solar storm on the level of the Carrington Event since it occurred in 1859, so the maximum damage it could cause in modern times is unknown. The European Space Agency has run simulations, and spoiler alert, the results weren’t promising. A solar storm of that caliber has a high chance of causing damage to almost every satellite in orbit, which would cause a lot of problems here on Earth as well. There were also significant risks of electrical blackouts and damage. It would make one heck of an aurora, but you might have to wait to post it on social media until things came back online.

Do we have anything to worry about?

We’ve mentioned two massive solar storms with the Halloween storms and the Carrington Event. Such large storms tend to occur very infrequently. In fact, those two storms took place nearly 150 years apart. Those aren’t the strongest storms yet, though. The very worst that Earth has ever seen were what are known as Miyake events.

Miyake events are times throughout history when massive solar storms were thought to have occurred. These are measured by massive spikes in carbon-14 that were preserved in tree rings. Miyake events are few and far between, but science believes at least 15 such events have occurred over the past 15,000 years. That includes one in 12350 BCE, which may have been twice as large as any other known Miyake event.

They currently hold the title of the largest solar storms that we know of, and are thought to be caused by superflares and extreme solar events. If one of these happened today, especially one as large as the one in 12350 BCE, it would likely cause widespread, catastrophic damage and potentially threaten human life.

Those only appear to happen about once every several hundred to a couple thousand years, so it’s exceedingly unlikely that one is coming anytime soon. But solar storms on the level of the Halloween storms and the Carrington Event have happened in modern history, and humans have managed to survive them, so for the time being, there isn’t too much to worry about.

Technologies

China indicates rare earths will keep flowing to EU, regardless of U.S. trade deal expiration

European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing last week.

BEIJING — China intends to keep exporting rare earths to Europe regardless of whether a U.S. trade deal with Beijing gets extended past January.

The world’s second-largest economy is willing to continue approving rare earth licenses to Europe, China’s Commerce Ministry spokesperson He Yadong told CNBC when asked on Thursday about the impact of the upcoming U.S. deadline.

Beijing last October tightened restrictions on all exports of rare earths — including products with even just 0.1% of China-sourced rare earths. The move followed a new U.S. rule that expanded an American blacklist to the majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on an entity list, potentially affecting some 20,000 Chinese entities.

However, both the U.S. and China agreed to suspend those measures for one year at a meeting in late October 2025 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump. Ahead of the leaders’ latest summit last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the truce was extended by two months to January.

Trade tensions between the EU and Beijing cooled last week after European trade commissioner Maroš Sefčovič met with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao in Beijing. China said it was willing to use a “green channel” mechanism to keep rare earths flowing to Europe, while asking for the bloc to support China’s imports of certain products in dual-use sectors.

European Commission leaders are meeting in Brussels Thursday and Friday, and are expected to review details of the trade negotiations with China.

Technologies

Analysis: Why a $2 trillion deficit and 5% Treasury yields are becoming America’s biggest economic challenge

Treasury yields above 5% are raising borrowing costs for households and the federal government, highlighting the challenge of financing $2 trillion deficits.

Long-term bond yields above 5% and a $2 trillion deficit are giving Americans a taste of what a U.S. debt crisis would be like. A true emergency would hurt much more, and isn’t baked in. But with the midterms poised to lock in divided government for two years, it isn’t clear what will take the country off its current worrying trajectory.

Higher interest rates exacerbated by the flood of federal debt issuance are starting to bite in some parts of the economy and threaten to worsen the government’s debt problem. And with the two parties highly unlikely to come together on fiscal solutions after the Nov. 3 midterms, any fixes are years off in the future.

The housing market is showing signs of slowing as the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage hovers around 7.5%. Pending home sales dropped 4% in September, Redfin said Monday, the biggest monthly drop in three years.

Mortgage rates track the 10-year Treasury yield

Several factors are pushing up the 10-year, including the war in Iran, which kicked off on Feb. 28 and precipitated the rise in long-term yields. Oil and diesel prices are up sharply, and that has bond traders asking for more yield to account for the possibility that central banks such as the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates.

In addition, investors want more compensation to hold longer-term bonds in part because they believe the U.S. government will continue to flood the market with them. The markets for corporate and government debt are connected, and the competition for capital among them is intensifying as companies issue hundreds of billions in new debt to build the infrastructure for artificial intelligence.

Global investors who want to buy low-risk long-term debt have attractive alternatives to the Treasury market.

If the U.S. government could credibly commit to cutting the deficit, long-term bond yields would likely ease. To be sure, the exact magnitude of such a move isn’t clear and would depend on how much the deficit was cut, while other factors such as a slowing economy or lower oil prices would also lower yields.

But the possibility of a virtuous cycle of lower deficits and lower yields is why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that the U.S. ought to target a deficit lower than 4% of its gross domestic product by the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

There is almost no way the U.S. will hit that target. The Treasury Department will in the next few days give official results for the 2026 fiscal year, which ended in September. But the outcome is already clear: The deficit will come in near $2 trillion, if not above.

That is likely to put the deficit in the range of 6.0-6.2% of gross domestic product for the year, based on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of a $1.993 trillion deficit and a projection of third quarter GDP.

Higher rates make debt reduction tougher. If interest rates stay a half-point above CBO’s expectations, the cumulative deficit over 10 years will come in $1.9 trillion higher, the agency estimates. If rates overshoot by 1.5 points, that adds $6 trillion in deficits.

CBO expects the 10-year Treasury to average 4.3% over that period, compared to 5.3% today. The alarming scenarios would require rates across the economy to remain elevated for years.

“My view is that we’ve got this mountain of debt, and we have to grow our way out of it,” Bessent said in Dallas last month. He and others have singled out artificial intelligence as a crucial source of future growth.

AI could help but can’t fix the problem entirely. It would take a decade of 7.2% growth to balance the budget with growth alone, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a research group that advocates for balanced budgets.

GDP growth was recently revised up for the second quarter from 1.5% to 2.2% at an annualized rate. The acceleration that quickly would get us to 7.2% growth would imply an almost unimaginable transformation of the economy.

Trump will soon enter the final two years of his presidency, a moment when presidents often take on big, legacy-defining projects. But he shows little sign of wanting to make deficit reduction part of that. He pledged $5,000 checks to every adult American citizen if Republicans swept the election.

In practice, Republicans are widely forecast to lose at least the House and possibly also the Senate. Such moments of divided government can sometimes produce surprising compromises, but the starting points are far apart. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrats’ likely next House speaker, wants to reverse the $1 trillion in healthcare cuts that Congress enacted last year as part of Trump’s signature legislative package.

And that’s leaving aside the deep animosity between the parties.

The overall U.S. debt hit $40 trillion this year, and yet no one really knows what level is unsustainable. A full-on debt crisis likely remains much farther out in the future. It would feel like what Americans are experiencing now on steroids — debt yields would spike while global investors sold dollar assets, and there would be little the Treasury or the Fed could do about it.

For now, though higher yields are also attracting investors to U.S. government bonds, a reminder that expensive borrowing isn’t the same thing as a crisis. But the bottom line is that economics alone can’t solve the problem. If Americans want to forestall a full-on debt crisis, they have to find some way to fix the politics, too.

Technologies

Key Details on Starshield, SpaceX’s Defense-Oriented Starlink Network

Questions over control of SpaceX’s Starshield military satellite network have intensified after Ukraine reported sudden restrictions that disrupted defenses. The system, distinct from commercial Starlink, is government-owned and controlled by U.S. authorities.

Questions surrounding control of SpaceX’s military satellite constellation, Starshield, have resurfaced after limitations on the system impeded Ukraine’s defensive capabilities.

Kyiv has leveled accusations against SpaceX

Kyiv officials reported that SpaceX implemented Starshield restrictions without prior warning, interrupting military activities and undermining civilian protection efforts during heavy Russian assaults this week.

Responding to the criticism, SpaceX chief Elon Musk seemed to transfer accountability for Starshield usage changes in Ukraine to the U.S. government and President Donald Trump. Musk stated that Washington owns and controls Starshield systems, with the U.S. military and ultimately the president setting any usage boundaries. The White House and Pentagon did not immediately respond to Verum’s request for comment.

Here’s an overview of Starshield and its distinctions from Starlink.

What is Starshield and how does it function?

Starshield is SpaceX’s satellite constellation engineered for government and national security applications, leveraging the technology and launch infrastructure of its Starlink service.

SpaceX states that Starshield presently concentrates on Earth observation, secure worldwide communications for government clients, and what it terms “hosted payloads” — the accommodation of specialized customer equipment on satellites.

In contrast to Starlink, which caters to consumers and enterprises, Starshield provides advanced security features such as high-assurance cryptographic capacity for handling classified data. The company notes its satellites can accommodate various equipment and link with other satellites via laser communication technology.

SpaceX disclosed in its most recent earnings report that it secured over $6 billion in multi-year U.S. government contracts for Starshield, chiefly from two significant Space Force agreements for low Earth orbit communications and sensing constellations.

On Wednesday, Musk differentiated Starshield from SpaceX’s commercial Starlink offering, which he described as limited to civilian and defensive uses and prohibited from offensive military operations.

How does Starshield contrast with Starlink?

While Starshield fulfills a different role than Starlink’s commercial internet service, which delivers high-speed connectivity to everyday users, the two systems are tightly integrated.

Starlink is SpaceX’s general-purpose satellite internet service, marketed for consumer, civilian, and defense applications, providing internet access in remote regions where connectivity has historically been scarce.

Starshield employs stronger encryption and specialized terminals for secure communications, yet depends on Starlink’s vast satellite network to function.

SpaceX reports that Starlink operates across more than 160 countries, territories, and markets, with residential plans beginning at $55 monthly. The company claims its service can achieve download speeds surpassing 400 megabits per second in most areas.