After Northern Lights appeared as far south as Colorado, Live Science discusses how "cannibal" 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.
00:10And it's called like a cannibal coronal mass ejection.
00:14That's the thing that's causing all of these auroras going on right now.
00:19Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:22Yeah.
00:22That sounds a little terrifying.
00:24I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
00:25Because like just as soon as we get over one kind of corona, we get hit by another.
00:28But like this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection, like if I break that down for you, it's caused by sunspots.
00:36So there's a sunspot in the sun called like AR2975 right now.
00:41And what it's been doing over the last, say, like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions, two of which have headed straight towards us.
00:52Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.
00:55It 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, it cannibalized it.
01:09It swept it all up into this one big wave of like these these charged particles.
01:13And then they all swept towards the Earth.
01:16And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.
01:20What where they come from in how sunspots are created is magnetic fields are created on the sun.
01:26Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.
01:29So like there's loads of charged particles eddying and moving around on like inside the sun across the sun surface.
01:35Now, when you have charged particles moving, you're going to induce some magnetism there.
01:40But because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles, like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere, you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other.
01:50They'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else.
01:54And eventually they will have to snap and release energy.
01:58Now, they release energy either in the form of a solar flare, like a bright flare of radiation, or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from the sun.
02:08What's the difference between solar flares and coronal mass ejections?
02:12So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation from that from that field line snapping that energy release.
02:19A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being like burped out of the sun.
02:25I love that phrase plasma soup.
02:28Yeah, tasty plasma soup.
02:30I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?
02:36I mean, does it affect Earth?
02:40So it does, but not in like a, so not in an always really terrible way.
02:47Most of the time, the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field, which is really, really good news for us,
02:53because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed out at us.
02:59In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour, which is just, I guess, 33 times less than the speed of light.
03:06Pretty quick.
03:07So what the Earth's magnetic field will do is it will absorb all of these particles.
03:14The energy will go into stretching out the magnetic field in space.
03:18So it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the, it gives it a long tail.
03:23And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.
03:35And when these, when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light to, in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level, that's what, why we see the aurora.
03:46Now, because there's so many of these like particles coming in, you're getting auroras much lower down along the Northern hemisphere than you would normally expect to see.
03:56That's, that's, that's, that's, that's a pretty, that's a nice effect there.
04:01And I know that people had already taken video from it.
04:06This is from Manitoba in Canada.
04:11Beautiful.
04:11Just absolutely beautiful.
04:13Yeah.
04:14Yeah.
04:14Yeah.
04:14And like, I think also you could see the aurora in the U S certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last two days as well.
04:23Oh, right.
04:23On a space weather.com that you guys were sharing information from they showed some pictures, purple.
04:31I mean, purple, what a, what an aura that earth is giving off of this aurora.
04:37And, you know, I, when you mentioned poles, I'm like, that's why they're always up there towards the poles.
04:44We got to get closer to some poles, Ben.
04:46Yeah.
04:46But so, okay.
04:48So that's the good.
04:49What, how about damage?
04:52Damage.
04:53Okay.
04:54Yes.
04:55So damage.
04:57So they can cause damage.
04:59So one of the most recent kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this type was 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 lot of them have shielded like their, their, their, like power cables and things like that with a kind of Faraday cage, basically, which diverts the energy.
05:24Or they also have like other techniques that allow them to kind of siphon off excess energy that might be given to power lines by storms like this.
05:33Okay.
05:33But like, that hasn't always been the case, like, especially back in 1859, there was a really big event called the great Carrington event, which was the largest sort of solar storm in modern human history.
05:45I'm sure there have been solar storms just as large throughout our past, but like before that point, we weren't really documenting it and we didn't have many electronics around, so we didn't really care.
05:56But in this case, the great Carrington event fried most of the telegram systems in the US and in Europe that had been developed at the time, and it also led to auroras that could be seen around, like as far south as the, as the Caribbean.
06:13And like, there were people waking up at night thinking that, like thinking that it was daytime in the Caribbean because of these enormous auroras from this event.
06:22I mean, we were freaked out about it now when we see things like that.
06:26We know more, but I can't even imagine, you know, over a hundred years ago.
06:30Yeah, yeah, exactly.
06:32In terms of more modern sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage, other than the Quebec event, recently, actually, there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the downing of 40, like 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites.
06:47That was one thing that happened.
06:49And on top of that as well, there's a potential risk that internet, like the internet in general, especially in the United States, could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm because a lot of these cables run underwater through like, like latitudes that would be affected by it.
07:08And like, you would have a geomagnetic storm, they're not shielded.
07:13So 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 legislation, it's like earthquakes.
07:23It doesn't often get legislated for until the worst has already happened.
07:26Yeah, that's a shame.
07:27I mean, I really like the internet.
07:29I really, I like to keep it around.
07:31This is how we get to communicate, right?
07:32Yeah, exactly.
07:36But, but you're saying that we have protections now.
07:39So most, I think most like power companies have already built in protections into their grids for these kind of things.
07:46It's just, yeah, you're not going to be getting any like, I guess, coronal mass ejection memes in the middle of a coronal mass ejection.
07:53You have to wait a few weeks for them to fix this to power the underwater cables.
07:56Yeah, and, and luckily Earth, you know, we have this nice electromagnetic shield, right, already built in.
08:03Otherwise, we'd be, you know, goners, you know.
08:05Yeah, it would fry us and it would also fry our atmosphere.
08:08Like a big reason why Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere, for instance, is it doesn't really have very active magnetic field.
08:14So all of those, all of the atmosphere, when, when it gets hit by this, these wave of like hydrogen, like particles, protons, like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly.
08:25Poor Mars. Poor Mars.
08:27Yeah.
08:28But that's why we're here, right? We're not, we're not, I mean, we are on Mars, but, you know, not yet.
08:33Not yet, not yet.
08:34Well, so is there a way to know when things like this will happen?
08:40I know we watch the sun, we have video of the sun. It seems more like after the fact.
08:44Yeah. So you get a bit of advanced warning. Like, for instance, the Great Carrington event is named after Richard Carrington, who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky, like a few, like a few hours, like maybe about 15 hours before the actual like event hit.
09:01But the sun is quite a complex object. Like there's loads going on in those 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.