As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks—wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader-follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.

These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrinks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.

Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots do occasionally snap. This happens when they stretch past a critical height 250,000 miles above the surface of the sun and break through its corona, releasing their stored energy in a fiery maelstrom of subatomic particles that lashes into outer space and goes sweeping across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun—an area ten times larger than our planet—and equal millions of hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb blasts in strength, triggering worldwide disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. They cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, though any significant increase of sunspot activity is considered to be a possible indicator of solar flares in generation.

On the third day of March, during a peak in the sunspot cycle, a group of frecklelike spots that seemed the very definition of unremarkable to astronomers who routinely track them moved to the far side of the sun in their orbital course. There over the next two weeks, beyond the range of visual observation, they began to enlarge, multiply, and align in long, close-grouped strings. By the twelfth of the month the spots had become highly asymmetric; their heavy concentration resembled a spreading, blotchy rash on the hidden face of the sun. The escalated growth and proliferation would continue for several days to come.

Again, in the long view, this outbreak was a blip. A millennial tickle in the life of the sun.

Nothing extraordinary.