It’s easy to forget that the world as we know it could end at any given moment. After all, there have been 5 mass extinction events in Earth’s history already, and the last one was (only) 66,000,000 years ago. So it’s really just a matter of time before it happens again.

Well according to astronomers, our planet could experience another mass extinction event as early as tomorrow (Friday, May 16).

Two days ago, astronomers witnessed a vast ‘bird wing’ eruption send waves of superheated plasma across the sun’s northern hemisphere. I’m not going to pretend like I know anything about this sort of thing, so I’ll just copy & paste the important bit from the MailOnline article:

At over 600,000 miles long (one million km), the filament of solar material was more than twice as long as the distance from the Earth to the moon.

Now, scientists predict that part of this filament eruption could hit Earth tomorrow.

The Earth-facing side of our Sun has been taking a bit of a nap recently, but finally did something noteworthy! Check out this gorgeous “bird wing” filament eruption today. Thus far, it looks like it will mostly miss us, but we could get the wake of the structure passing by Earth… pic.twitter.com/Eppnw2jmuB

— Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) May 13, 2025

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, aurora chaser Jure Atanackov predicted that the full force of this eruption could trigger a severe or even extreme geomagnetic storm, the highest level on official rating systems.

Stunning video recorded by NASA’s solar observation satellites shows the moment that filaments of plasma 75 times larger than Earth peeled away from the sun in a pair of sweeping ‘wings’.

Most of the material was shot out of the sun’s north pole, so it will mostly avoid Earth.

However, astronomers say that Earth will probably receive a glancing blow from the wake of the passing storm.

Now I know what you’re thinking: that quote says that the 6,000-mile wide ‘bird wing’ will mostly avoid Earth, and will only give it a ‘glancing blow’. Nothing to worry about, right?

Well, maybe that’s just what they want us to think. After all, if you knew that the world was about to be obliterated by an unthinkably massive wave of molten hot fire that will turn us and all our belongings into ashes, would you go around telling everyone? Or keep quiet and let us stay ignorant of the reality of what’s about to happen? Ignorance is bliss, after all. That way we can go quickly and quietly, without warning, and without even knowing what hit us. Surely that’s ideal in an end-of-the-world scenario.

Fair play to the astronomers if that’s what they’re going for on this one. Hopefully I’m wrong, obviously. Not least because it’s only about a year left until GTA VI comes out. We’ll see what happens tomorrow. Goodnight everyone! Don’t forget to slap on that SPF 30.