What is a solar storm and what can it do to our planet or us people

It's an event on the surface of the sun that throws off a shower of charged matter called a Coronal Mass Ejection. They happen frequently, and the frequency increases and decreases on an 11-year cycle. The maximum of the current cycle is expected to be about a year from now, so the frequency is expected to increase gradually. So you're going to be hearing about more storms all year. However, this cycle has been one of the quietest on record, so the "increased frequency" is a lot less than in the last cycle, which peaked in 2001.

The shower of particles could go in any direction. If it goes toward earth, it can have some electromagnetic effects when it hits the earth's magnetic field. The main effect is to cause auroras at the poles, and it also poses a hazard to spacecraft and astronauts. Here on the surface we're shielded by the magnetic field, but in space the particles would be dangerous.

The electromagnetic effects can also cause radio noise, even disrupting communications briefly if it's strong enough. In 1989 a storm caused a voltage spike on the power grid in Canada and they had a brief blackout. In 1859, 140 years earlier, something similar caused a brief outage on the telegraph system. But those events are extremely rare. Notice the difference between "brief outage" and anything you might be reading about "WE'RE GOING TO BE KNOCKED BACK TO THE STONE AGE OMG OMG OMG!!!"

It's when the Sun throws a bunch of material off its surface out into space. These occur almost EVERY day, and have for billions of years. Every 11 years our Sun enters a period of time where these are more frequent. We're getting close to one of those periods now. During extremely slow times there may be a solar storm every other week or so. It can do this to our planet....are you ready.....absolutely nothing. Solar storms only affect electronics. Satellites can get knocked out, but modern satellites are shielded to protect from this, and they can power them down during really intense periods of solar activity so the electronics don't get overloaded, since solar storms happen so often they plan for this....... Solar storms are what is responsible for the northern lights. During a really bad solar storm a power station in the far northern or southern latitudes MIGHT could get overloaded due to all the charged particles and fail. Power would only be out as long as it took to replace the damaged electronics though. So at absolute most a couple of hours. Good ole fashioned Earth thunderstorms cause much more damage than solar storms can. The only people who have anything at all to fear from solar storms are astronauts traveling through deep space who don't have the Earth's magnetic field to protect them. But we don't have any deep space missions going on now so....non-issue. Astronauts in the space station don't have as much protection as we do on the surface because they don't have 100 miles of Earth's atmosphere and the full benefit of our magnetic field protecting them. But they have areas in the station that are more heavily shielded that they can get into during a solar storm.

Wow. Big answers.

"What is a solar storm and what can it do to our planet or us people?"

Aurora.