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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00:00there are some beautiful auroras happening in the northwest of America right now.
00:04Yeah so like NOAA scientists have given this a really really simple explanation and it's it's
00:10called like a cannibal coronal mass ejection that's the that's the thing that's causing all
00:16of these auroras going on right now. Cannibal corona mass ejection. Yeah that sounds a little
00:23terrifying. I mean it's it's kind of funny right because like just soon as we get over one kind of
00:27corona we get hit by another but like this this one like a cannibal coronal mass ejection like if
00:32I break that down for you it's caused by sunspots. So there's a sunspot on the sun called like AR2975
00:40right now. Okay. And what it's been doing over the last say like few days is producing up to 17
00:46solar eruptions two of which were have headed straight towards us. Now one of them was traveling
00:54faster than the other. It was the one just like that came just after the first one that was emitted.
01:01Now when those when that second sun like the coronal mass ejection caught up with the first
01:08it cannibalized it. It swept it all up into this one big wave of part of like these these charged
01:13particles and then they all swept towards the earth and then when they hit it they caused a
01:19geomagnetic storm. What where they come from in how sunspots are created is magnetic fields are
01:25created on the sun like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma so like there's loads of charged
01:30particles eddying and moving around on like inside the sun across the sun's surface. Now when you have
01:36charged particles moving you're going to induce some magnetism there but because magnetic field
01:41lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles like this giant traffic jam of particles
01:46moving everywhere you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other they'll
01:51form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else and eventually they will have to
01:56snap and release energy. Now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare like a bright
02:01flare of radiation or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma
02:07from the sun. What's the difference between solar flares and ronald mass ejections? So solar flares
02:13it's just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation and from that from that field line
02:17snapping that energy release. A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup
02:23actually being like burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup. Yeah tasty plasma nice
02:30I mean pretty but I mean a little terrifying right? I mean does it affect earth? So it does
02:41but not in like a so not in an always really terrible way most of the time the earth has a
02:48pretty strong magnetic field which is really really good news for us because it protects us
02:54from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed out at us. In this
03:00case at like speeds of like two million miles per hour which is just I guess 33 times less than the
03:06speed of light pretty quick. So what the earth's magnetic field will do is it will absorb all of
03:13these particles the energy will go into stretching out the magnetic field in space so it's like it's
03:19kind of bunched out towards the it gives it a long tail and then most of those particles will gather
03:28kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and then energize some of the molecules
03:34in the atmosphere and when these when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light
03:40in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level that's what why we see the aurora. Now
03:46because there's so many of these like particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower down
03:53along the northern hemisphere than you would normally expect to see.
03:57That's a pretty that's a nice effect there and I know that people had
04:04already taken video from it. This is from Manitoba in Canada beautiful just absolutely beautiful.
04:13Yeah yeah yeah and like I think also you could see the aurora in the U.S. certainly like as far
04:18south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last few days as well. Oh right on spaceweather.com
04:26that you guys were sharing information from they showed some pictures purple I mean purple what a
04:33what an aura that earth is giving off of this aurora and you know I when you mentioned poles
04:41I'm like that's why they're always up there towards you we got to get closer to some poles Ben.
04:46Yeah yeah. But so okay so that's the good what how about damage? Okay yes so damage so they can
04:58cause damage so one of the most recent kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this
05:04type was um in the was the 1989 Quebec power cut which was caused by a geomagnetic storm.
05:11Now most of the time especially when it comes to people who provide like power lines and stuff a
05:16lot of them have shielded like their their their like power cables and things like that with a kind
05:21of faraday cage basically which diverts the energy or they also have like other techniques that allow
05:28them to kind of siphon off excess energy that might be given to power lines by storms like this.
05:33Okay. But like that hasn't always been the case like especially back in 1859 there was a really
05:38big event called the Great Carrington Event which was the largest sort of solar storm in modern
05:44human history. I'm sure there have been solar storms just as large throughout our past but like
05:51before that point we weren't really documenting it we didn't have many electronics around so we
05:55didn't really care. But in this case the Great Carrington Event fried most of the telegram
06:02systems in the U.S. and in Europe that had been developed at the time and it also led to auroras
06:09that could be seen around like as far south as the as the Caribbean and like there were people
06:14waking up at night thinking that like thinking that it was daytime in the Caribbean because of
06:20these enormous auroras from this event. I mean we're freaked out about it now when we see things
06:26like that we know more but I can't even imagine you know over 100 years ago. Yeah yeah exactly.
06:32In terms of more modern sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage other than the
06:37Quebec event recently actually there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the downing of 40
06:44like 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites. That was one thing that happened and on top of that as well
06:51there's a potential risk that internet like the internet in general especially in the United
06:58States could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm because a lot of these cables run underwater
07:05through like latitudes that would be affected by it and like you would have a geomagnetic storm
07:12they're not shielded so they would basically be probably quite severely affected by this
07:16but as is the case with a lot of things and how they're done with like legislation it's like
07:22earthquakes it doesn't often get legislated for until the worst has already happened. Yeah that's
07:27a shame I mean I really like the internet I really I like to keep it around this is how we get to
07:31communicate right but but you're saying that we have protections now. So most I think most
07:41like power companies have already built in protections into their grids for these kind of
07:45things it's just yeah you're not going to be getting any like I guess coronal mass ejection
07:51memes in the middle of a coronal mass ejection you have to wait a few weeks for them to fix
07:54this to power the underwater cables. Yeah and and luckily earth you know we have this nice
08:00electromagnetic shield right already built in otherwise we'd be you know goners. Yeah it would
08:05fry us and it would also fry our atmosphere like a big reason why Mars doesn't have much of an
08:10atmosphere for instance it doesn't really have very active magnetic fields so all of those all
08:16of the atmosphere when when it gets hit by this these wave of like hydrogen like particles protons
08:23like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly. Poor Mars, poor Mars. Yeah but that's
08:28why we're here right we're not we're not I mean we are on Mars but you know not yet. Not yet not
08:33yet. Well so is there a way to know when things like this will happen? I know we watch the sun
08:41we have video of the sun it seems more like after the fact. Yeah so you get a bit of advanced warning
08:49like for instance the Great Carrington event is named after Richard Carrington who spotted like
08:53intense solar flares in the sky like a few like a few hours like maybe about 15 hours before the
09:00actual like event hit but the sun is quite a complex object like there's loads going on in
09:06those magnetic fields it's still really really hard for scientists to predict what's going on there.
09:11Yeah if only if only well until until the next major astronomical event thanks so much Ben. Thank you.
09:30you