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Think you already know a lot about Aurora and orders of magnitude? Or, want to see where you land before you learn more? Test your knowledge,\u00a0here!<\/a><\/p>\n Have you looked into the sky at stars or the moon and wondered how far away they were? Outer space is large, beyond belief. Outer space is so enormous, it\u2019s sometimes hard to comprehend the size and distance of objects we see in space compared to things that are more familiar to us on Earth. But, it\u2019s important to understand things like the distance between us, here on Earth, and things in space like aurora or other planets and stars. \u00a0Big things happen in space that affect us. \u00a0Not too far away is an entity so large in both size and power that if its surface erupts, we are affected. \u00a0That entity is our home star, the Sun.<\/p>\n Some explosions on the surface of the sun are larger than our home planet, sometimes much, much larger. \u00a0When the surface of the sun is particularly active, sometimes, we can see evidence of it here on Earth. \u00a0People have been <\/span>reporting observations of solar activity for over 2,000 years<\/span><\/a> with some of those observations including reports of sunspots. \u00a0A s<\/a><\/span>unspot<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is an area on the surface of the sun that is cooler than the area around it, seen as a dark spot to us. They are small compared to the size of the Sun – like tiny dots, but are really pretty massive. \u00a0Luckily, we have a tool that uses both math and science to help us better understand the size of things far away like sunspots. Something called <\/span>orders of magnitude<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n The term \u2018magnitude\u2019 often makes people think of something with great size or extent. And this is true in this case, too – orders of magnitude involve some really huge numbers! But, what exactly are orders of magnitude? Orders of magnitude are written in powers of 10, which is the an important thing to know about them. This means that if an order of magnitude is expressed as 1 x104<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0that would correspond to the number 10,000. Expressing a number using this formula helps us make approximate comparisons<\/span> . To determine the order of magnitude for a number, we need to first figure out how many powers of 10 are in that number.<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s a chart to help us better understand what this means:<\/span><\/p>\n