A giant sunspot area now facing Earth. Big enough to swallow Earth! And angry enough to black us out too.

One of NASA's twin solar observatory probes called SDO has recorded a massive new sunspot area that has rotated around and is now facing towards Earth.

Photo: @CamillaSDO via Twitter

How massive? Well the whole Earth could be swallowed literally without touching the sides of a couple of the smaller ones. And the big one is the size of Jupiter.

If we get a big blast from this lot - called a coronal mass ejection (CME) - pointed our way, we can expect a whole lot more than gorgeous auroras. There would be a high likelihood of global electronic interference and related problems. A famous example of a big blast was in 1849:

"Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies."

So interesting as it might be to see how our modern world would cope with such an event, maybe it's better to keep your fingers crossed we miss out!

More about sunspots:



This is only three seconds but amazing:



And just because we are talking about auroras (and because the music is so beautiful too) check this out: