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 in the northwest of America right now.
00:04 Yeah, so like NOAA scientists have given this a really, really simple explanation and it's called
00:11 like a cannibal coronal mass ejection. That's the thing that's causing all of these
00:16 auroras going on right now. Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:22 Yeah. That sounds a little terrifying.
00:24 I mean it's kind of funny, right? Because like just soon as we get over one kind of corona,
00:27 we get hit by another. But like this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection,
00:32 like if I break that down for you, it's caused by sunspots. So there's a sunspot on the sun
00:37 called like AR 2975 right now. And what it's been doing over the last, say, like few days is
00:44 producing up to 17 solar eruptions, two of which have headed straight towards us. Now, one of them
00:53 was traveling faster than the other. It was the one that came just after the first one that was
01:00 emitted. Now, when that second sun, like coronal mass ejection, caught up with the first, it
01:08 cannibalized it. It swept it all up into this one big wave of like these charged particles. And then
01:14 they all swept towards the Earth. And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.
01:21 Where they come from in how sunspots are created is magnetic fields are created on the sun. Like
01:26 the sun is just a giant ball of plasma. So like there's loads of charged particles
01:31 eddying and moving around on like inside the sun, across the sun's surface. Now, when you have
01:36 charged particles moving, you're going to induce some magnetism there. But because magnetic field
01:41 lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles, like this giant traffic jam of particles
01:46 moving everywhere, you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other.
01:50 They'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else. And eventually, they will
01:56 have to snap and release energy. Now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare, like a
02:01 bright flare of radiation, or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of
02:06 that plasma from the sun. What's the difference between solar flares and ronal mass ejections?
02:11 So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation. And from that from that
02:17 field line snapping that energy release, a coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma
02:23 soup actually being like burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup.
02:27 Yeah, tasty. Nice. I mean, pretty. But I mean, a little terrifying, right? I mean,
02:37 does it affect Earth? Um, so it does, but not in like a, so not in an always really terrible way.
02:47 Most of the time, the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field, which is really, really good news
02:52 for us, because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has
02:58 just spewed out. In this case, like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour, which is just I guess,
03:03 33 times less than the speed of light pretty quick. So what the Earth's magnetic field will do
03:11 is it will absorb all of these particles, the energy will go into stretching out the magnetic
03:17 field in space. So it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the little it gives it a long tail.
03:23 And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go
03:30 downwards, and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere. And when these when these
03:38 molecules in the atmosphere then give out light to in order to kind of go down to a lower energy
03:43 level. That's what why we see the aurora now, because there's many of these like particles
03:49 coming in, you're getting auroras much lower down along the northern hemisphere than you would
03:55 normally expect to see. That's, that's, that's, that's a pretty, that's a nice effect there.
04:01 And I know that people had already taken video from it. This is from Manitoba in Canada.
04:09 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I think also, you could see the
04:16 aurora in the US certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last
04:21 two days as well. Oh, right on spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information from.
04:29 They showed some pictures purple. I mean, purple, what a, what an aura that Earth is giving off
04:35 of this aurora. And you know, I, when you mentioned poles, I'm like, that's why they're
04:42 always up there towards. Yeah, we got to get closer to some poles, Ben. Yeah. But so okay,
04:48 so that's the good. What? How about damage? Okay, yes. So damage. Um, so they can cause damage.
04:59 So one of the most recent kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this type was in
05:06 the was the 1989 Quebec power cut, which was caused by a geomagnetic storm. Now, most of the time,
05:13 especially when it comes to people who provide like power lines and stuff, a lot of them have
05:17 shielded like their their their like power cables and things like that with a kind of
05:22 Faraday cage, basically, which diverts the energy or they also have like other techniques that
05:27 allow them to kind of siphon off excess energy that might be given to power lines by storms like
05:32 this. Okay, but like that hasn't always been the case, like, especially back in 1859, there was a
05:38 really big event called the Great Carrington event, which was the largest sort of solar storm in
05:44 modern human history. I'm sure there have been solar storms, just as large throughout our past.
05:50 But like before that point, we weren't really documenting it. We didn't have many electronics
05:54 around. So we didn't really care. But in this case, the Great Carrington event, fried most of
06:02 the telegram systems in the US and in Europe that had been developed at the time. And it also led to
06:08 auroras that could be seen around like as far south as the Caribbean. And like there were people
06:14 waking up at night, thinking that like thinking that it was daytime in the Caribbean, because of
06:20 these enormous auroras from this event. I mean, we're freaked out about it now. And we see things
06:26 like that we know more, but I can't even imagine, you know, over 100 years ago. Yeah, exactly. In
06:32 terms of more modern sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage, other than the Quebec
06:38 event. Recently, actually, there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the downing of 40,
06:44 like 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites. That was one thing that happened. And on top of that,
06:51 as well, there's a potential risk that internet, like the internet in general, especially in the
06:58 United States, could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm, because a lot of these cables run underwater
07:05 through like, like latitudes that would be affected by it. And like you would have a
07:10 geomagnetic storm, they're not shielded. So they would basically be probably quite severely
07:15 affected by this. But as is the case with a lot of things, and how they're done with legislation,
07:21 it's like earthquakes, it doesn't often get legislated for until the worst has already
07:25 happened. Yeah, that's a shame. I mean, I really like the internet. I really, I like to keep it
07:30 around. This is how we get to communicate, right? But, but you're saying that we have protections
07:38 now. So most, I think most like power companies have already built in protections into their grids
07:45 for these kind of things. It's just, yeah, you're not going to be getting any, like, I guess,
07:50 coronal mass ejection memes in the middle of a coronal mass ejection. You have to wait a few
07:53 weeks for them to fix this to power the underwater cables. Yeah. And luckily, Earth, you know, we have
07:59 this nice electromagnetic shield, right, already built in otherwise we'd be, you know, goners.
08:05 Yeah, it would fry us and it would also fry our atmosphere. Like a big reason why Mars doesn't
08:09 have much of an atmosphere, for instance, it doesn't really have very active magnetic fields.
08:14 So all of those, all of the atmosphere when it gets hit by this wave of like, hydrogen, like
08:20 particles, protons, like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly. Poor Mars. Poor
08:26 Mars. Yeah. But that's why we're here, right? We're not, we're not, I mean, we are on Mars,
08:31 but you know, not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Well, so is there a way to know when things like this
08:39 will happen? I know we watched the sun, we have video of the sun, it seems more like after the fact.
08:44 Yeah, so you get a bit of advanced warning. Like, for instance, the Great Carrington Event is named
08:51 after Richard Carrington, who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky, like a few,
08:57 like a few hours, like maybe about 15 hours before the actual like event hit. But the sun is quite a
09:04 complex object, like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields. It's still really,
09:08 really hard for scientists to predict what's going on there. Yeah. If only, if only. Well,
09:15 until the next major astronomical event. Thanks so much, Ben. Thank you.
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