Particle blasts from the sun could destroy our ozone layer.

Earth’s magnetic shield

The Earth’s magnetic field provides an important protective shield for life, deflecting electrically charged radiation from the Sun. In its natural state, it acts like a giant magnet with field lines rising from one pole, rotating, and dropping back down from the other pole, in a pattern sometimes described as an “inverted grapefruit.” The vertical orientation at the poles allows some ionizing cosmic radiation to penetrate into the upper atmosphere, where it interacts with gas molecules in the atmosphere to create the glow we know as the aurora.

However, this field changes a lot over time. Over the past century, the North Magnetic Pole has been moving across northern Canada at a speed of about 40 kilometers per year, and the magnetic field has weakened. More than 6%Geological records show that there have been periods of centuries or millennia when the Earth’s magnetic field was very weak or even completely absent.

We can see what would happen without Earth’s magnetic field by observing Mars, which lost its global magnetic field in the distant past, and thus most of its atmosphere. In May, shortly after dawn, Strong solar particle event hits MarsThis event caused the probe to stop working. Mars Odyssey It caused radiation levels on the surface of Mars to be about 30 times higher than what you would receive from a chest X-ray.

Proton force

The Sun’s outer atmosphere emits a constant, fluctuating stream of electrons and protons known as the “solar wind.” However, the Sun’s surface also sporadically emits bursts of energy, mostly protons, in solar particle events, which are often associated with solar flares.