What Makes a "cannibal coronal mass ejection (CME)".
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00:00Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:03Yeah.
00:03That sounds a little terrifying.
00:05I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
00:06Because like, just as soon as we get over one kind of corona,
00:08we get hit by another.
00:09But like, this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection,
00:13like if I break that down for you, it's caused by sunspots.
00:17So there's a sunspot in the sun called like AR2975 right now.
00:21Okay.
00:22And what it's been doing over the last, say,
00:24like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions,
00:29two of which were headed straight towards us.
00:33Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.
00:36It was the one just like,
00:39that came just after the first one that was emitted.
00:42Now, when those, when that second sun,
00:45like the coronal mass ejection caught up with the first,
00:49it cannibalized it.
00:50It swept it all up into this one big wave
00:52of like these charged particles.
00:55And then they all swept towards the earth.
00:57And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.
01:01What, where they come from in how sunspots are created is,
01:05magnetic fields are created on the sun.
01:07Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.
01:10So like there's loads of charged particles,
01:12eddying and moving around on like,
01:14inside the sun across the sun surface.
01:17Now, when you have charged particles moving,
01:19you're going to induce some magnetism there.
01:21But because magnetic field lines can't cross
01:23and you've got all these moving particles,
01:25like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere,
01:28you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other.
01:31They'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else.
01:35And eventually they will have to snap and release energy.
01:38Now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare,
01:41like a bright flare of radiation,
01:43or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out
01:47some of that plasma from the sun.
01:48What's the difference between solar flares and ronal mass ejections?
01:52So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation
01:56from that field line snapping that energy release.
02:00A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup
02:04actually being like burped out of the sun.
02:07I love that phrase, plasma soup.
02:09Mm-hmm. Yeah. Tasty plasma soup.
02:11Nice. I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?
02:17I mean.