What Makes Auroras? | LiveScience - video Dailymotion

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

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

00:03 from that field line snapping that energy release.

00:07 A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's plasma soup

00:11 actually being burped out of the sun.

00:13 I love that phrase, plasma soup.

00:15 - Yeah, tasty plasma soup. - Wow, I hear the nice...

00:18 I mean, pretty, but a little terrifying, right?

00:24 I mean, does it affect Earth?

00:28 So it does, but not in like a...

00:31 So not in an always really terrible way.

00:34 Most of the time, the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field,

00:39 which is really, really good news for us

00:41 because it protects us from all of these

00:42 like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed out at us.

00:47 In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour,

00:50 which is just I guess 33 times less than the speed of light.

00:54 Pretty quick.

00:56 So what the Earth's magnetic field will do

00:59 is it will absorb all of these particles.

01:02 The energy will go into stretching out the magnetic field in space.

01:06 So it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the...

01:09 It gives it a long tail.

01:12 And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles

01:17 where they will like go downwards

01:19 and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.

01:24 And when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light

01:29 in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level,

01:31 that's why we see the aurora.

01:33 Now, because there's so many of these like particles coming in,

01:38 you're getting auroras much lower down along the Northern Hemisphere

01:42 than you would normally expect to see.

01:45 That's a pretty... That's a nice effect there.

01:49 And I know that people had already taken video from it.

01:54 This is from Manitoba in Canada.

01:59 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful.

02:01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:02 And like I think also you could see the aurora in the US

02:05 certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon

02:09 over the last few days as well.

02:11 Oh, right. On spaceweather.com

02:13 that you guys were sharing information from,

02:17 they showed some pictures.

02:18 Purple, I mean purple.

02:20 What an aura that Earth is giving off of this aurora.

02:25 And you know, when you mentioned poles,

02:29 I'm like, that's why they're always up there towards the poles.

02:32 We got to get closer to some poles then.

What Makes Auroras? | LiveScience

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