Sun burps easy on the eye, but they're devastating for satellites

The solar cycle is the 11-year variation that sun goes through in its activity. During this cycle, the sun's magnetic field changes, or flips. Imagine your magnet going from positive to negative, so instead of sticking to your fridge, it now repels it.

Some parts of this cycle are called minima, when the activity on the sun is a lot less, producing less flares and sunspots. There is also the maxima when the sun is at its peak activity.

This is when we see big solar flares and coronal mass ejections - eruptions on the sun where some of its material is ejected and travels through space. For the past few years, we've been slowly getting out of the minima, and seeing more activity, with the next maximum predicted to be sometime between 2023 and 2026.

The sun's activity has various impacts on Earth. Some are quite beautiful, and people book holidays just to try and catch it - the aurora. The Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, or the Aurora Australia, the Southern Lights, are the result of activity from the sun.

Over the past few years, there have been less aurora, as we've been in the sun's quiet period. As the activity ramps up, the spotting of aurora will increase, with reports just the other week of aurora in Tasmania.

As charged particles and material leave the sun, they travel through space and slam into our Earth's atmosphere. Since this material is charged, it excites the gas in our atmosphere, and when it does, causes it to glow, producing the aurora.

It is similar to a neon sign, which sends an electrical current through a tube filled with neon (or other gasses) and causes it to glow. Instead of electricity, essentially a burp from the sun has travelled 150 million kilometers and is hitting our atmosphere.

While on Earth the show is beautiful, in space for our satellites and any humans, it is a very different situation.

Big storms can cause interference with satellite communications, which can severely impact operations on Earth. If the storm is really big, it can even damage the satellite, even disabling it.

There is also a lot of radiation, so astronauts in space have to be on alert depending on the strength of a storm. This is yet another potential issue that might face our new era of space tourism.

The storms also physically change the Earth's atmosphere - the density of it. As the density increases, it means moving in it dramatically changes. Satellites are designed to orbit at a certain speed and angle through the upper layers of our atmosphere. With this sudden change from the solar storm, it dramatically affected the orbit.

READ MORE SUNDAY SPACE:

Imagine riding up a hill on your bike, with a bit of wind behind you to give you an extra push. Now, all of the sudden, you are having 100km/hr gusts head on. The result? You'll slow down and come back down the hill.

While this seems to be the first case of something like this, as we are launching satellites at an incredible rate which is only picking up, and as we head into the next maximum, we may have more events like this.

Space technology is really going to need to plan around sun burps to avoid being damaged or destroyed.