Cannibal CME, Solar Flares and Sunspots
After witnessing the array of Northern Lights as far south as Colorado, we discuss how Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) are formed and what impact they have on Earth.
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00:00 There are some beautiful auroras happening
00:02 in the Northwest of America right now.
00:04 - Yeah, so like NOAA scientists have given this
00:07 a really, really simple explanation
00:09 and it's called like a cannibal coronal mass ejection.
00:14 That's the thing that's causing
00:16 all of these auroras going on right now.
00:18 - Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:21 - Yeah.
00:22 - That sounds a little terrifying.
00:23 - I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
00:25 Because like just as soon as we get over one kind of corona,
00:27 we get hit by another.
00:28 But like this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection,
00:32 like if I break that down for you,
00:34 it's caused by sunspots.
00:35 So there's a sunspot on the sun called like AR2975 right now
00:40 and what it's been doing over the last say,
00:43 like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions.
00:48 Two of which have headed straight towards us.
00:52 Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.
00:55 It was the one just like that came just after
00:59 the first one that was emitted.
01:01 Now, when that second sun, like coronal mass ejection
01:06 caught up with the first, it cannibalized it.
01:09 It swept it all up into this one big wave
01:11 of like these charged particles
01:14 and then they all swept towards the earth
01:16 and then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.
01:20 Where they come from in how sunspots are created
01:23 is magnetic fields are created on the sun.
01:26 Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.
01:28 So like there's loads of charged particles
01:31 eddying and moving around on like inside the sun,
01:34 across the sun's surface.
01:35 Now, when you have charged particles moving,
01:38 you're gonna induce some magnetism there.
01:40 But because magnetic field lines can't cross
01:42 and you've got all these moving particles,
01:44 like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere,
01:47 you'll inevitably get these field lines
01:49 bunched up next to each other.
01:50 They'll form into these tight knots
01:52 that can't escape anywhere else
01:54 and eventually they will have to snap and release energy.
01:57 Now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare,
02:00 like a bright flare of radiation
02:02 or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out
02:06 some of that plasma from the sun.
02:07 - What's the difference between solar flares
02:10 and coronal mass ejections?
02:11 - So solar flares is just the bright flash
02:14 that you'll see of radiation
02:16 from that field line snapping that energy release.
02:19 A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's
02:22 like plasma soup actually being like burped out of the sun.
02:25 - I love that phrase, plasma soup.
02:27 - Tasty plasma soup.
02:30 - I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?
02:35 I mean, does it affect earth?
02:38 - So it does, but not in like a,
02:43 so not in an always really terrible way.
02:46 Most of the time,
02:48 the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field,
02:51 which is really, really good news for us
02:53 because it protects us from all of these
02:54 like highly energized particles
02:56 that the sun has just spewed out at us.
02:59 In this case, like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour,
03:02 which is just, I guess,
03:04 33 times less than the speed of light, pretty quick.
03:07 So what the earth's magnetic field will do
03:11 is it will absorb all of these particles.
03:14 The energy will go into stretching out
03:16 the magnetic field in space.
03:18 So it's like, it's kind of bunched out towards the,
03:21 it gives it a long tail.
03:24 And then most of those particles will gather
03:27 kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards
03:31 and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.
03:36 And when these molecules in the atmosphere
03:39 then give out light in order to kind of go down
03:42 to a lower energy level, that's why we see the aurora.
03:45 Now, because there's so many of these
03:48 like particles coming in,
03:50 you're getting auroras much lower down
03:53 along the Northern hemisphere
03:54 than you would normally expect to see.
03:56 - That's a pretty, that's a nice effect there.
04:01 And I know that people had already taken video from it.
04:06 This is from Manitoba in Canada.
04:10 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful.
04:13 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
04:14 And like, I think also you could see the aurora
04:16 in the US certainly like as far South as Pennsylvania,
04:20 Iowa and Oregon over the last few days as well.
04:23 - Oh, right, on spaceweather.com
04:25 that you guys were sharing information from,
04:29 they showed some pictures, purple.
04:31 I mean, purple, what an aura
04:34 that Earth is giving off of this aurora.
04:37 And you know, when you mentioned poles,
04:41 I'm like, that's why they're always up there towards.
04:44 We gotta get closer to some poles then.
04:46 - Yeah, yeah.
04:46 - But so, okay, so that's the good.
04:49 What, how about damage?
04:53 - Okay, yes, so damage.
04:56 So they can cause damage.
04:58 So one of the most recent kind of power outages
05:02 that was caused by a storm of this type
05:04 was the 1989 Quebec power cut,
05:09 which was caused by a geomagnetic storm.
05:11 Now, most of the time,
05:12 especially when it comes to people who provide
05:14 like power lines and stuff,
05:15 a lot of them have shielded like their,
05:18 their like power cables and things like that
05:20 with a kind of Faraday cage basically,
05:23 which diverts the energy,
05:24 or they also have like other techniques
05:27 that allow them to kind of siphon off excess energy
05:29 that might be given to power lines by storms like this.
05:33 - Okay.
05:34 - But like that hasn't always been the case.
05:35 Like, especially back in 1859,
05:38 there was a really big event
05:39 called the Great Carrington Event,
05:41 which was the largest sort of solar storm
05:44 in modern human history.
05:45 I'm sure there have been solar storms
05:47 just as large throughout our past,
05:50 but like before that point,
05:52 we weren't really documenting it
05:53 and we didn't have many electronics around,
05:55 so we didn't really care.
05:56 But in this case,
05:58 the Great Carrington Event fried
06:01 most of the telegram systems in the US and in Europe
06:04 that had been developed at the time.
06:06 And it also led to auroras
06:09 that could be seen around like as far south
06:11 as the Caribbean.
06:13 And like there were people waking up at night
06:16 thinking that it was daytime in the Caribbean
06:20 because of these enormous auroras from this event.
06:23 - I mean, we're freaked out about it now
06:25 when we see things like that.
06:26 We know more, but I can't even imagine,
06:28 you know, over a hundred years ago.
06:30 - Yeah, yeah, exactly.
06:32 In terms of more modern sort of phenomena
06:35 that have caused more modern damage,
06:37 other than the Quebec event,
06:39 recently actually there was another geomagnetic storm
06:42 that caused the downing of 40,
06:44 like 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites.
06:48 That was one thing that happened.
06:50 And on top of that as well,
06:51 there's a potential risk that internet,
06:56 like the internet in general,
06:57 especially in the United States,
06:59 could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm
07:02 because a lot of these cables run underwater
07:05 through like latitudes that would be affected by it.
07:09 And like you would have a geomagnetic storm,
07:11 they're not shielded.
07:13 So they would basically be probably
07:15 quite severely affected by this.
07:16 But as is the case with a lot of things
07:19 and how they're done with legislation,
07:21 it's like earthquakes.
07:22 It doesn't often get legislated for
07:24 until the worst has already happened.
07:26 - Yeah, that's a shame.
07:27 I mean, I really like the internet.
07:28 I really, I like to keep it around.
07:30 This is how we get to communicate, right?
07:32 - Exactly, yeah, exactly.
07:36 - But you're saying that we have protections now.
07:39 - So I think most like power companies
07:42 have already built in protections into their grids
07:45 for these kinds of things.
07:46 It's just, yeah, you're not gonna be getting any like,
07:49 I guess, coronal mass ejection memes
07:51 in the middle of a coronal mass ejection.
07:53 You have to wait a few weeks for them to fix this
07:54 to power the underwater cables.
07:56 - Yeah, and luckily, Earth,
07:59 we have this nice electromagnetic shield, right?
08:02 Already built in otherwise we'd be goners.
08:04 - Yeah, it would fry us
08:06 and it would also fry our atmosphere.
08:07 Like a big reason why Mars doesn't have
08:09 much of an atmosphere, for instance,
08:11 is it doesn't really have very active magnetic fields.
08:14 So all of the atmosphere,
08:16 when it gets hit by this wave of like hydrogen,
08:20 like particles, like protons,
08:23 like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly.
08:25 - Poor Mars, poor Mars.
08:27 - Yeah.
08:28 - But that's why we're here, right?
08:29 We're not, I mean, we are on Mars, but not yet.
08:33 - Not yet, not yet.
08:34 Well, so is there a way to know
08:38 when things like this will happen?
08:39 I know we watched the sun, we have video of the sun.
08:42 It seems more like after the fact.
08:44 - Yeah, so you get a bit of advanced warning.
08:48 Like for instance, the Great Carrington event
08:50 is named after Richard Carrington,
08:52 who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky,
08:56 like a few hours, like maybe about 15 hours
08:59 before the actual like event hit.
09:02 But the sun is quite a complex object.
09:05 Like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields.
09:07 It's still really, really hard for scientists
09:09 to predict what's going on there.
09:11 - Yeah, if only, if only.
09:14 Well, until the next major astronomical event.
09:17 Thanks so much, Ben.
09:19 - Thank you.
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