Those Beautiful Auroras Were From A Major Solar Flare
After Northern Lights appeared as far south as Colorado, Live Science discusses how "cannibal" 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,
00:09 and it's called a cannibal coronal mass ejection.
00:14 That's the thing that's causing all of these auroras going on right now.
00:18 Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:21 That sounds a little terrifying.
00:24 I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
00:25 Because like just soon as we get over one kind of corona, 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, it's caused by sunspots.
00:36 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, like few days,
00:44 is producing up to 17 solar eruptions, 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 that came just after 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 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 is
01:24 magnetic fields are created on the sun.
01:26 Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.
01:29 So like there's loads of charged particles eddying and moving around
01:32 inside the sun, across the sun's surface.
01:35 Now, when you have charged particles moving, you're going to 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 bunched up next to each other.
01:50 They'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else.
01:54 And eventually, they will have to snap and release energy.
01:58 Now, they release energy either in the form of a solar flare,
02:00 like a bright flare of radiation,
02:03 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 and coronal mass ejections?
02:11 So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation.
02:15 - Okay. - From that field line
02:17 snapping that energy release.
02:19 A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup
02:23 actually being like burped out of the sun.
02:25 - I love that phrase, plasma soup. - Yeah, tasty plasma soup.
02:30 - I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?
02:36 I mean, does it affect Earth? - So it does, but not in like a...
02:44 So not in an always really terrible way.
02:47 Most of the time, the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field,
02:50 which is really, really good news for us
02:53 because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles
02:57 that the sun has just spewed out at us.
02:59 In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour,
03:02 which is just, I guess, 33 times less than the speed of light.
03:06 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 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.
03:23 And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles
03:29 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 then give out light,
03:41 in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level,
03:44 that's why we see the aurora.
03:46 Now, because there's many of these like particles coming in,
03:49 you're getting auroras much lower down along the northern hemisphere
03:54 than you would normally expect to see.
03:56 That's a pretty...
03:59 That's a nice effect there.
04:01 And I know that people had already taken video from it.
04:05 This is from Manitoba in Canada.
04:10 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful.
04:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
04:14 And like I think also you could see the aurora in the US certainly
04:17 like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last few days as well.
04:22 Oh, right.
04:23 On spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information from,
04:28 they showed some pictures.
04:30 Purple, I mean purple.
04:32 What an aura 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 the poles.
04:44 We got to get closer to some poles, Ben.
04:46 Yeah, yeah.
04:46 But so, okay, so that's the good.
04:49 How about damage?
04:52 Okay, yes.
04:54 So damage.
04:55 So they can cause damage.
04:59 So one of the most recent kind of power outages
05:02 that was caused by a storm of this type was the 1989 Quebec power cut,
05:09 which was caused by a geomagnetic storm.
05:11 Now, most of the time,
05:13 especially when it comes to people who provide like power lines and stuff,
05:16 a lot of them have shielded like their power cables and things like that
05:20 with a kind of Faraday cage basically, which diverts the energy.
05:24 Or they also have like other techniques that allow them to kind of
05:28 siphon off excess energy that might be given to power lines by storms like this.
05:33 But like that hasn't always been the case,
05:35 like especially back in 1859,
05:38 there was a really big event called the Great Carrington Event,
05:40 which was the largest sort of solar storm in modern human history.
05:45 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.
05:53 We didn't have many electronics around, so we didn't really care.
05:57 But in this case, the Great Carrington Event fried
06:01 most of the telegram systems in the US and in Europe that had been developed at the time.
06:05 And it also led to auroras that could be seen around like as far south as the Caribbean.
06:12 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.
06:22 I mean, we're freaked out about it now when we see things like that.
06:26 We know more, but I can't even imagine, you know, over 100 years ago.
06:30 - Yeah, exactly.
06:32 In terms of more modern sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage,
06:36 other than the Quebec event,
06:38 recently, actually, there was another geomagnetic storm
06:42 that caused the downing of 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites.
06:47 That was one thing that happened.
06:49 And on top of that as well, there's a potential risk
06:54 that internet, like the internet in general,
06:57 especially in the United States, could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm
07:02 because a lot of these cables run underwater
07:05 through latitudes that would be affected by it.
07:09 And you would have a geomagnetic storm.
07:12 They're not shielded.
07:13 So they would basically be probably quite severely affected by this.
07:16 But as is the case with a lot of things and how they're done with legislation,
07:21 it's like earthquakes.
07:22 It doesn't often get legislated for 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.
07:35 - But you're saying that we have protections now.
07:38 - So I think most power companies have already built in protections
07:44 into their grids for these kinds of things.
07:46 It's just, yeah, you're not going to be getting any, like,
07:49 I guess, coronal mass ejection memes in the middle of a coronal mass ejection.
07:53 You'll have to wait a few weeks for them to fix this, the power, the underwater cables.
07:56 - Yeah, and luckily, Earth, you know, we have this nice electromagnetic shield, right?
08:02 Already built in, otherwise we'd be, you know, goners.
08:04 - Yeah, it would fry us and it would also fry our atmosphere.
08:08 Like a big reason why Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere, for instance,
08:11 is it doesn't really have a very active magnetic field.
08:14 So all of those, all of the atmosphere,
08:17 when it gets hit by this wave of hydrogen particles, like protons,
08:22 the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly.
08:25 - Poor Mars, poor Mars.
08:27 - Yeah.
08:27 - But that's why we're here, right?
08:29 But we're not, we're not, I mean, we are on Mars, but, you know, not yet.
08:32 - Not yet, not yet.
08:34 - Well, so is there a way to know when things like this will happen?
08:39 I know we watch 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.
08:49 Like, for instance, the Great Carrington Event is named after Richard Carrington,
08:52 who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky,
08:55 like a few, like a few hours, like maybe about 15 hours before the actual event hit.
09:01 But the sun is quite a complex object, like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields.
09:08 It's still really, really hard for scientists to predict what's going on there.
09:10 - Yeah, if only, if only.
09:13 - If only.
09:14 Well, until the next major astronomical event.
09:18 Thanks so much, Ben.
09:18 - Thank you.
09:27 - Bye.
09:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]