CME farside of sun
© YouTube/nemesis maturity (screen capture)
Solar Minimum is not as quiet as you think. On March 20th, something exploded on the farside of the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) saw the debris flying over the sun's eastern limb:


The blast site was hidden from view, so we don't know what exploded. It probably wasn't a sunspot. Sunspots have been extremely scarce for the past two years. More likely, a filament of magnetism became unstable and erupted, hurling bits of itself and surrounding plasma into space.

The resulting coronal mass ejection (CME) will miss Earth. But consider this: If the explosion had occurred only a couple weeks later, when the blast site would be facing Earth, we would now be bracing for a moderately strong geomagnetic storm. Maybe next time!