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When they slammed into Earth’s magnetic bubble, the world was treated to iridescent displays of the northern and southern lights.

While many solar storms send gusts of solar wind in other directions, those that hit the Earth can compress and distort our magnetosphere, the protective magnetic bubble surrounding the planet, says Miesch.

Plenty gets captured by Jupiter’s colossal magnetic bubble, but some of it slams back into Io’s atmosphere, or into the other three moons’ gassy sheaths.

Magnetic fields and energetic particles ejected from the sun reach Earth and are ensnared by our planet’s magnetic bubble.

That ejection arrived at Earth sometime around Feb. 2, creating a geomagnetic storm in Earth’s magnetic bubble.