What Makes a Cannibal Coronal Mass Ejection

What Makes a "cannibal coronal mass ejection (CME)".

Transcript

00:00Cannibal Corona Mass Ejection.

00:03Yeah.

00:03That sounds a little terrifying.

00:05I mean, it's kind of funny, right?

00:06Because like, just soon as we get over one kind of corona, we get hit by another.

00:09But like, this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection,

00:13like if I break that down for you, it's caused by sunspots.

00:17So there's a sunspot on the sun called like AR2975 right now.

00:21Okay.

00:22And what it's been doing over the last, say, like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions,

00:29two of which have headed straight towards us.

00:33Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.

00:36It was the one that came just after the first one that was emitted.

00:42Now, when that second sun, like the coronal mass ejection,

00:47caught up with the first, it cannibalized it.

00:50It swept it all up into this one big wave of like these charged particles.

00:55And then they all swept towards the Earth.

00:57And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.

01:01What, where they come from in how sunspots are created is

01:05magnetic fields are created on the sun.

01:07Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.

01:10So like there's loads of charged particles, eddying and moving around on like

01:14inside the sun across the sun's surface.

01:16Now, when you have charged particles moving, you're going to induce some magnetism there.

01:21But because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles,

01:25this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere,

01:28you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other.

01:31They'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else.

01:35And eventually, they will have to snap and release energy.

01:39Now, they release energy either in the form of a solar flare,

01:41like a bright flare of radiation,

01:44or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from the sun.

01:48What's the difference between solar flares and coronal mass ejections?

01:52So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation

01:57from that field line snapping that energy release.

02:00A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup

02:04actually being like burped out of the sun.

02:07I love that phrase, plasma soup.

02:09Yeah, tasty.

02:11I mean, pretty.

02:14But I mean, a little terrifying, right?