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Cannibal CME, Solar Flares and Sunspots
Live Science
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yesterday
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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Tech
Transcript
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00:00
there are some beautiful auroras happening in the northwest of america right now yeah so like noah
00:06
scientists have given this a really really simple explanation and it's it's called uh like a cannibal
00:12
coronal mass ejection that's the con that's the thing that's causing all of these auroras going on
00:18
right now cannibal corona mass ejection yeah that sounds a little terrifying i mean it's it's kind
00:24
of funny right because like just soon as we get over one kind of corona we get hit by another but
00:28
like this this one like a cannibal coronal mass ejection like if i break that down for you
00:34
it's caused by sunspots so there's a sunspot on the sun called like ar 2975 right now okay um and what
00:41
it's been doing over the last say like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions two of which
00:49
um were i've headed straight towards us now one of them was traveling faster than the other it was the
00:55
one just like that came just after the first one that was emitted now when those when that second
01:03
sun like the coronal mass ejection caught up with the first it cannibalized it it swept it all up into
01:10
this one big wave of part of like these these charged particles and then they all swept towards the earth
01:16
and then when they hit it they caused a geomagnetic storm what where they come from in how sunspots are
01:23
created is magnetic fields are created on the sun like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma so
01:29
like there's loads of charged particles eddying and moving around on like inside the sun across the sun
01:35
surface now when you have charged particles moving you're going to induce some magnetism there but
01:40
because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles like this giant traffic
01:45
jam of particles 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 have
01:56
to snap and release energy now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare like a bright
02:01
flare of radiation or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from
02:07
the sun what's the difference between solar flares and ronal mass ejections so solar flares is just
02:13
the bright flash that you'll see of radiation from that from that field line snapping that energy release
02:19
a coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being like burped out of the
02:25
sun i love that phrase plasma soup mm-hmm yeah tasty nice uh i mean pretty but i mean a little terrifying
02:36
right i mean does it affect earth um so it does but not in like a so not in an always really terrible
02:46
way most of the time the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field which is really really good news for
02:52
us because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just
02:58
spewed out at us um in this case at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour which is just i guess
03:04
33 times less than the speed of light pretty quick um so what the earth's magnetic field will do is it will
03:12
absorb all of these particles the energy will go into stretching out the magnetic field in space
03:18
so it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the it gives it a long tail um and then
03:25
most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and then
03:32
energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere and when these when these um molecules in the atmosphere
03:39
then give out light um to in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level that's what why we see
03:45
the aurora now because there's many of these like particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower
03:52
down um along the northern hemisphere than you would normally expect to see that's that's that's that's a
03:59
pretty that's a nice effect there um and i know that uh people had already taken video from it uh this is
04:07
from manitoba in canada beautiful just absolutely beautiful yeah yeah yeah and like i think also
04:16
you could see the aurora in the us certainly like as far south as pennsylvania iowa and oregon over the
04:21
last two days as well oh right on uh spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information from
04:28
uh they showed some pictures purple i mean purple what a what an aura that earth is giving off of this
04:36
aurora and you know i uh when you mentioned poles i'm like that's why they're always up there towards
04:43
yeah we got to get closer to some poles ben yeah yeah but so okay so that's the good what uh how about
04:52
damage okay yes so damage um so they can cause damage so one of the most recent kind of power outages that
05:02
was caused by a storm of this type was um in the was the 1989 quebec power cut which was caused by a
05:10
geomagnetic storm now most of the time especially when it comes to people who provide like power lines
05:15
and stuff a lot of them have shielded like their their their like power cables and things like that
05:20
with a kind of faraday cage basically which diverts the energy or they also have like other techniques
05:27
that 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 really big
05:38
event called the great carrington event um which was the largest sort of solar storm in modern human
05:45
history i'm sure there have been solar storms just as large throughout our past but like before that
05:51
point we weren't really documenting it and we didn't have many electronics around so we didn't
05:55
really care um but in this case the great carrington event fried most of the telegram systems in the us
06:03
and in europe that had been developed at the time and it also led to auroras that could be seen around
06:10
like as far south as the as the caribbean um and like there were people waking up at night thinking
06:17
that the like thinking that it was daytime in the caribbean because of these enormous auroras from
06:22
this event i mean we we're freaked out about it now when we see things like that we know more
06:27
but i can't even imagine you know over 100 years ago yeah yeah exactly in terms of um more modern
06:34
sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage other than the quebec event um recently actually
06:40
there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the downing of um 40 like 40 of spacex's starlink
06:46
satellites that was one thing that happened um and on top of that as well there's a potential risk
06:54
um that internet like the internet in general especially in the united states could be cut out
07:00
by a geomagnetic storm because a lot of these cables run underwater through like like latitudes
07:07
that would be affected by it and like you would have a geomagnetic storm they're not shielded
07:13
so they would basically be probably quite severely affected by this but as is the case with a lot of
07:18
things and how they're done with like legislation it's like earthquakes it doesn't often get
07:23
legislated for until the worst has already happened yeah that's a shame i mean i really like the internet
07:28
i really i like to keep it around this is how we get to communicate right exactly um but but you're
07:37
saying that we have protections now so most i think most like power companies have already built in
07:44
protections into their grids for these kind of things it's just yeah you're not going to be getting
07:48
any like um i guess coronal mass ejection memes in the middle of a coronal mass ejection you have to
07:53
wait a few weeks for them to fix this to power the underwater cables yeah and and luckily earth you
07:59
know we have this nice electromagnetic shield right already built in otherwise we'd be you know goners you
08:04
know 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 um magnetic field so all
08:15
of those all of the atmosphere when when it gets hit by this these wave of like hydrogen like particles
08:21
protons um like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly poor mars poor mars yeah but that's why
08:28
we're here right we're not we're not i mean we are on mars but you know yeah yeah not yet not yet not yet
08:34
well so is there a way to know when things like this will happen i know we watch the sun we have
08:41
video of the sun it seems more like after the fact yeah so you get a bit of advanced warning like for
08:49
instance the great carrington event is named after richard carrington who spotted like intense
08:54
solar flares in the sky like a few like a few hours like maybe about 15 hours before the actual like
09:01
event hit but the sun is quite a complex object like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields
09:08
it's still really really hard for scientists to predict what's going on there yeah if only if only
09:13
well until until until the next major astronomical event thanks so much ben thank you
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