Cannibal CME, Solar Flares and Sunspots
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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