From the brains behind brains on, this is the Moment of Um.

Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom.

Someone just took your picture. Flash. You just popped on the kitchen light in the middle of the night. Flash! You turned on a flashlight, but it was accidentally pointing right at your face.

Flash!

You look up at the sun, squint your eyes, and...

Nothing.

Even if there is a solar flare, because it's incredibly rare to see them with the human eye.

Hi, my name is Graham.

My question is, what is a solar flare? Oh, solar flares are wonderful. So there's some of the most beautiful things that you see happening on our sun's surface. So if you look at the sun, invisible light, obviously you don't look at the sun directly, but if you use a filter or you look at images on the web and you look at a sun, invisible light. Obviously, you don't look at the sun directly, but if you use a filter or you look at

images on the web and you look at a sun invisible light, you'll see it's kind of a uniform sphere,

but it may have a few little dark splotches on the sun, and they are sunspots. And they are actually

associated with very intense active regions on the sun. From time to time, these active regions

get sort of so much energy kind of pent up inside that active region that they have to explode

and sort of release the energy out away from the active region. So that it's just like this

big explosion of light and heat and also radiation that comes

out with it.

And they can actually interfere with us here at Earth.

They can interact with our Earth's magnetic field and they can cause very big space weather

events here at Earth.

Things like beautiful Aurora that you can see in the sky,

also issues with power grids, problems with spacecraft, with GPS navigation.

And so that's one of the reasons that we really, really want to understand our star so well, so that we can predict space weather and we can better protect life and society here on

...