Solar activity is indeed on the rise, says Dr. David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but there may be nothing to worry about. Judging from recent sunspot counts, the 2000 solar maximum will be slightly less spectacular than sunspot peaks in 1978 and 1989. Those maxima caused occasional problems with satellites and power blackouts, but nothing that threatened civil order or world finance. Been there. Done that.
This animation shows a coronal mass ejection (CME) erupting from the Sun on March 19-20, 2000. Around the time of the solar maximum, CMEs like these are observed nearly every day. When they are directed at Earth they can cause geomagnetic disturbances including beautiful auroras. These data were captured by the C3 coronagraph on the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
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