The mainstream media once again manages to mangle basic science to a horrifying extent in the pursuit of sensationalism. Things like this make it very hard to talk as a scientist to non-scientists because the breathless and wrong reporting makes for a perpetual state of let down for non-scientists on the one hand and over scepticism (due to being lied to so often) on the other hand when there really is news.

There are no portals.

These are not doors.

You can’t go through one.

There is nothing even close to star trek here.

What it is, is looking at the sum of the Earth’s magneto-dynamics and the Sun’s magneto-dynamics and adding them. Since charged particles curl around magnetic field lines, these do act as a sort of highway for charged particles to get here. This is very much related to the Aurora Borealis and other atmospheric particle phenomena.