What Makes Auroras?

What's the difference between a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection? And how do they lead to auroras?

Transcript

00:00Solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation from that field line snapping

00:06that energy release. A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's plasma soup actually being

00:12burped out of the sun. I love that phrase, plasma soup. Yeah, tasty plasma soup. I mean, pretty,

00:20but I mean, a little terrifying, right? I mean, does it affect earth? Um, so it does, but not in like a,

00:31so not in a, in an always really terrible way. Most of the time, the earth has a pretty strong

00:37magnetic field, which 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. Um, in this case at like

00:48speeds of like 2 million miles per hour, which is just, I guess, 33 times less than the speed of

00:54light pretty quick. Um, so what the earth's magnetic field will do is it will absorb all of these

01:01particles. The energy will go into stretching out the magnetic field in space. So it's like,

01:07it's kind of bunched out towards the, it gives it a long tail. Um, and then most of those particles

01:15will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and then energize some of

01:22the molecules in the atmosphere. And when these, when these, um, molecules in the atmosphere then

01:27give out light, um, to, in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level, that's what, why we see

01:33the aurora. Now, because there's so many of these like particles coming in, you're getting auroras much

01:40lower down, um, along the Northern hemisphere than you would normally expect to see.

01:45That's, that's, that's, that's a pretty, that's a nice effect there. Um, and I know that, uh, people

01:51had already taken video from it. Uh, this is from Manitoba in Canada. Beautiful, just absolutely

02:00beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think also you could see the aurora in the U S certainly

02:05like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon over the last few days as well.

02:11Oh, right. On, uh, spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information from, uh, they

02:17showed some pictures purple. I mean, purple, what a, what an aura that earth is giving off

02:23of this aurora. And you know, I, uh, when you mentioned poles, I'm like, that's why they're

02:30always up there towards the poles. We got to get closer to some poles, Ben.