Rocket ship

Every eleven years or so our good neighbor the Sun becomes more restless. Sunspots are the most visible aspect of this, sometimes so large and numerous that they can be seen with the naked eye (not that you’re supposed to do that, of course). But this more active period is also accompanied by massive solar flares and coronal mass ejections—great geysers of starstuff packing enough energy to boil an ocean, spewed out across our solar system and occasionally at Earth, where it mucks up radios, jams electrons into electrical cables so that transformers burn out, and sometimes fries satellites, or at least addles their fragile electronic brains.