The Sun formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of dust and gas, and this film tracks the evidence for that birth, its violent middle age, and the ending physicists expect. At Johnson Space Center, engineers describe a ten-year NASA mission built to capture actual solar particles and bring them back to Earth, since no probe can survive contact with the surface itself. At California's Big Bear Solar Observatory, a scientist explains how the Sun's internal vibrations, essentially sound waves trapped inside it, let researchers pin down its age with precision no telescope image could provide. The film moves to Boulder's Space Environment Center to watch forecasters track the 1989 storm that knocked out power grids, then to Caltech, where physicists recreate solar explosions in the lab. Astronaut Michael Foale recounts being aboard the International Space Station during the intense 2003 solar activity, and a Louisiana astrophysicist presents nine stars caught mid-superflare, blasts up to ten million times stronger than anything the Sun has produced yet, and asks what one would do to Earth.