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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00:00there are some beautiful auroras happening in the northwest of america right now yeah so like noah
00:06scientists have given this a really really simple explanation and it's it's called uh like a cannibal
00:12coronal mass ejection that's the con that's the thing that's causing all of these auroras going on
00:18right now cannibal corona mass ejection yeah that sounds a little terrifying i mean it's it's kind
00:24of funny right because like just as soon as we get over one kind of corona we get hit by another but
00:28like this this one like a cannibal coronal mass ejection like if i break that down for you
00:34it's caused by sunspots so there's a sunspot on the sun called like ar 2975 right now okay um and what
00:41it's been doing over the last say like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions two of which
00:49um were i've headed straight towards us now one of them was traveling faster than the other it was the
00:55one just like that came just after the first one that was emitted now when those when that second
01:03sun like the coronal mass ejection caught up with the first it cannibalized it it swept it all up into
01:10this one big wave of like these these charged particles and then they all swept towards the earth
01:16and then when they hit it they caused a geomagnetic storm what where they come from in how sunspots are
01:23created is magnetic fields are created on the sun like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma so
01:29like there's loads of charged particles eddying and moving around on like inside the sun across the sun
01:35surface now when you have charged particles moving you're going to induce some magnetism there but
01:40because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles like this giant traffic
01:45jam 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 and eventually they will have
01:56to snap and release energy now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare like a bright
02:01flare of radiation or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from
02:07the sun what's the difference between solar flares and ronal mass ejections so solar flares is just
02:13the 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
02:25sun i love that phrase plasma soup mm-hmm yeah tasty nice uh i mean pretty but i mean a little terrifying
02:36right i mean does it affect earth um so it does but not in like a so not in an always really terrible
02:46way most of the time the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field which is really really good news for
02:52us because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just
02:58spewed out at us um in this case at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour which is just i guess
03:0433 times less than the speed of light pretty quick um so what the earth's magnetic field will do is it will
03:12absorb all of these particles the 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 um and then most of those
03:26particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and then energize
03:33some of the molecules in the atmosphere and when these when these um molecules in the atmosphere then
03:39give out light um to in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level that's what why we see the
03:45aurora now because there's so many of these like particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower
03:52down um along the northern hemisphere than you would normally expect to see that's that's that's that's a
03:59pretty that's a nice effect there um and i know that uh people had already taken video from it
04:05uh this is from manitoba in canada beautiful just absolutely beautiful yeah yeah yeah and like i think
04:15also you could see the aurora in the us certainly like as far south as pennsylvania iowa and oregon
04:21over the last two days as well oh right on uh spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information
04:27from uh they showed some pictures purple i mean purple what a what an aura that earth is giving
04:35off of this aurora and you know i uh when you mentioned poles i'm like that's why they're always
04:42up there towards yeah we got to get closer to some poles ben yeah yeah but so okay so that's the good
04:49what uh how about damage okay yes so damage um so they can cause damage so one of the most recent
05:01kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this type was um in the was the 1989 quebec
05:08power cut which was caused by a geomagnetic storm now most of the time especially when it comes to
05:14people who provide like power lines and stuff a lot of them have shielded like their their their
05:19like 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
05:30be given to power lines by storms like this okay but like that hasn't always been the case like
05:35especially back in 1859 there was a really big event called the great carrington event um which was
05:42the largest sort of solar storm in modern human history i'm sure there have been solar storms
05:48just as large throughout our past but like before that point we weren't really documenting it and we
05:53didn't have many electronics around so we didn't really care um but in this case the great carrington
05:59event fried most of the telegram systems in the us and in europe that had been developed at the time
06:05um and it also led to auroras that could be seen around like as far south as the as the caribbean
06:12um and like there were people waking up at night thinking that the like thinking that it was daytime
06:19in the caribbean because of these enormous auroras from this event i mean we we're freaked out about
06:25it now when we see things like that we know more but i can't even imagine you know over 100 years ago
06:30yeah yeah exactly in terms of um more modern sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage
06:37other than the quebec event um recently actually there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the
06:42downing of um 40 like 40 of spacex's starlink satellites that was one thing that happened um and
06:50on top of that as well there's a potential risk um that internet like the internet in general especially in
06:58the united states could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm because a lot of these cables run underwater
07:05through like like latitudes that would be affected by it and like you would have a geomagnetic storm
07:12they're not shielded so they would basically be probably quite severely affected by this but as is
07:17the case with a lot of things and how they're done with legislation it's like earthquakes it doesn't
07:23often get legislated for until the worst has already happened yeah that's a shame i mean i really
07:28like the internet i really i like to keep it around this is how we get to communicate right
07:34um but but you're saying that we have protections now so most i think most like power companies have
07:43already built in protections into their grids for these kind of things it's just yeah you're not going
07:48to be getting any like um 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 yeah and and luckily
07:58earth you know we have this nice electromagnetic shield right already built in otherwise we'd be
08:03you know goners you know yeah it would fry us and it would also fry our atmosphere like a big reason why
08:09mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere for instance it doesn't really have very active um magnetic field
08:14so all of those all of the atmosphere when when it gets hit by this these wave of like hydrogen like
08:20particles like protons um like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly poor mars
08:26poor mars yeah but that's why we're here right we're not we're not i mean we are on mars but you
08:31know yeah yeah not yet not yet not yet well so is there a way to know when things like this will happen
08:39i 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
08:51after richard carrington who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky like a few like a few hours
08:58like maybe about 15 hours before the actual like event hit but the sun is quite a complex object like
09:05there's loads going on in those magnetic fields it's still really really hard for scientists to predict
09:10what's going on there yeah if only if only well until until the next major astronomical event
09:18thanks so much ben thank you