Our corner of the universe, the solar system, is nestled inside the Milky Way galaxy, home to more than 100 billion stars. The solar system is encased in a bubble called the heliosphere, which separates us from the vast galaxy beyond—and some of its harsh space radiation.

We're protected from that radiation by the heliosphere, which itself is created by another source of radiation: the sun. The sun constantly spews charged particles, called the solar wind, from its surface. The solar wind flings out to about four times the distance of Neptune, carrying with it the magnetic field from the sun.

Auroras make for great Halloween décor over Earth, though ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet snapped these green smoky swirls of plasma from the International Space Station in August. Also pictured are the Soyuz MS-18 "Yuri Gagarin" (left) and the new Nauka module (right).

The Station saw quite some aurora activity that month, caused by solar particles colliding with Earth's atmosphere and producing a stunning light show.

Fast forward to October and space is quite busy.

On 9 October the sun ejected a violent mass of fast-moving plasma into space that arrived at Earth a few days later. The coronal mass ejection (CME) crashed into our planet's magnetosphere and once again lit up the sky.

CMEs explode from the sun, rush through the solar system and while doing so speed up the solar wind—a stream of charged particles continuously released from the sun's upper atmosphere.

While most of the solar wind is blocked by Earth's protective magnetosphere, some charged particles become trapped in Earth's magnetic field and flow down to the geomagnetic poles, colliding with the upper atmosphere to create the beautiful Aurora.