What's the difference between a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection? And how do they lead to auroras?
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00:00Solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation
00:04and from that from that field line snapping that energy release.
00:07A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup
00:11actually being like burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup.
00:16Yeah, tasty plasma soup. I mean
00:19pretty, but I mean a little terrifying, right? I mean does it affect Earth?
00:27So it does, but not in like a so not in an always really terrible way.
00:35Most of the time the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field
00:39which is really really good news for us because it protects us from all of these
00:43like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed out at us.
00:47In this case at like speeds of like two million miles per hour which is
00:51just I guess 33 times less than the speed of light.
00:54Pretty quick. So what the Earth's magnetic field will do
00:59is it will absorb all of these particles. The energy will go into
01:03stretching out the magnetic field in space. So it's like it's kind of
01:08bunched out towards the it gives it a long tail
01:12and then most of those particles will gather
01:16kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards
01:19and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.
01:24And when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light
01:28in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level
01:32that's why we see the aurora. Now because there's so many of these like
01:36particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower down
01:41along the northern hemisphere than you
01:43would normally expect to see. That's a pretty, that's a nice
01:48effect there. And I know that people had already
01:52taken video from it. This is from Manitoba in Canada.
01:59Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like I think also
02:04you could see the aurora in the U.S. certainly like as far south as
02:07Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon over the last two days
02:10as well. Oh right, on spaceweather.com that you
02:14guys were sharing information from they showed
02:17some pictures. Purple, I mean purple. What a what an
02:21aura that earth is giving off of this aurora.
02:25And you know I, when you mentioned poles I'm like that's why they're
02:30always up there towards the poles. We got to get closer
02:32to some poles then.