When last year's solar superstorm "Gannon" slammed into Earth, it not only painted the sky with beautiful auroras, but also shrunk one of the planet's protective layers to just one-fifth its usual size.

Data from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Arase satellite revealed the most dramatic collapse of the plasmasphere — a protective layer of charged particles that encircles our planet — ever recorded after the Gannon solar storm struck Earth on May 10, 2024, according to a statement from Nagoya University.

A geomagnetic superstorm occurs when the sun unleashes an exceptionally powerful burst of energy, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), toward Earth's magnetic field. These eruptions flood Earth's magnetosphere with huge amounts of solar energy, triggering intense ele

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