A solar storm is a powerful disturbance on the Sun that radiates outward across the heliosphere, impacting the entire Solar System and Earth's magnetosphere, and serves as the primary driver of space weather. While these storms don't directly harm humans, they can trigger geomagnetic storms that disrupt radio signals and power systems, and failures in critical infrastructure could lead to mass panic or significant economic losses. The main types of solar storms include solar flares (explosions caused by tangled magnetic field lines), coronal mass ejections (massive plasma bursts), geomagnetic storms (interactions with Earth's magnetic field), and solar particle events (streams of energetic protons). These events are closely linked to the solar cycle, an 11-year period of fluctuating sunspot activity, and can also produce spectacular auroras when particles interact with a planet's upper atmosphere. Understanding these phenomena is the focus of heliophysics, the scientific study of the Sun and its influence on the surrounding space.