Cannibal CME, Solar Flares and Sunspots

Live Science

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.

Transcript

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 and it's it's

00:10called like a cannibal coronal mass ejection that's the that's the thing that's causing all

00:16of these auroras going on right now. Cannibal corona mass ejection. Yeah that sounds a little

00:23terrifying. I mean it's it's kind of funny right because like just soon as we get over one kind of

00:27corona we get hit by another but like this this one like a cannibal coronal mass ejection like if

00:32I break that down for you it's caused by sunspots. So there's a sunspot on the sun called like AR2975

00:40right now. Okay. And what it's been doing over the last say like few days is producing up to 17

00:46solar eruptions two of which were have headed straight towards us. Now one of them was traveling

00:54faster than the other. It 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

01:08it cannibalized it. It swept it all up into this one big wave of like these these charged particles

01:14and then they all swept towards the earth and then when they hit it they caused a geomagnetic

01:19storm. 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 so like there's loads of charged particles eddying

01:32and moving around on like inside the sun across the sun's surface. Now when you have charged particles

01:37moving you're going to induce some magnetism there but because magnetic field lines can't cross and

01:42you've got all these moving particles like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere

01:47you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other. They'll form into these

01:51tight knots that can't escape anywhere else and eventually they will have to snap and release

01:57energy. Now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare like a bright flare of radiation

02:03or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from the sun.

02:07What's the difference between solar flares and ronald 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

02:18energy release. A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being like

02:24burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup. I mean pretty but I mean a little terrifying

02:36right? I mean does it affect earth? So it does but not in like a so not in an always really

02:46terrible way. Most of the time the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field which is really

02:51really good news for us because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles

02:56that the sun has just spewed out at us. In this case at like speeds of like 2 million miles per

03:02hour which is just I guess 33 times less than the speed of light. Pretty quick. So what the

03:09earth's magnetic field will do is it will absorb all of these particles. The energy will go into

03:15stretching out the magnetic field in space so it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the

03:21it gives it a long tail and then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles

03:29where they will like go downwards and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.

03:36And when these when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light in order to

03:41kind of go down to a lower energy level that's what why we see the aurora. Now because there's

03:47so many of these like particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower down along the northern

03:54hemisphere than you know would normally expect to see. That's that's that's that's a pretty that's

04:00a nice effect there. And I know that people had already taken video from it. This is from

04:08Manitoba in Canada. Beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful. Yeah yeah yeah and like I think also

04:16you could see the aurora in the U.S. certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over

04:21the last few days as well. Oh right on spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information

04:28from 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 when you mentioned poles I'm like that's why they're

04:42always up there towards. Yeah. We got to get closer to some poles Ben. Yeah yeah. But so okay so that's

04:48the good. What how about damage? Okay yes so damage. So they can cause damage. So one of the

05:00most recent kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this type was in the was the 1989

05:07Quebec power cut which was caused by a geomagnetic storm. Now most of the time especially when it

05:13comes to people who provide like power lines and stuff a lot of them have shielded like their

05:18their their like power cables and things like that with a kind of faraday cage basically which

05:23diverts the energy or they also have like other techniques that allow them to kind of siphon off

05:29excess energy that might be given to power lines by storms like this. Okay. But like that hasn't

05:34always been the case like especially back in 1859 there was a really big event called the Great

05:40Carrington Event which was the largest sort of solar storm in modern human history. I'm sure there

05:46have been solar storms just as large throughout our past but like before that point we weren't

05:52really documenting it and we didn't have many electronics around so we didn't really care.

05:57But in this case the Great Carrington Event fried most of the telegram systems in the US and in

06:04Europe that had been developed at the time and it also led to auroras that could be seen around

06:10like as far south as the Caribbean and like there were people waking up at night thinking that

06:17like thinking that it was daytime in the Caribbean because of these enormous auroras from this event.

06:23I mean we're freaked out about it now when we see things like that we know more but I can't

06:27even imagine you know over 100 years ago. Yeah exactly. In terms of more modern sort of

06:34phenomena that have caused more modern damage other than the Quebec event, recently actually

06:40there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the downing of 40 of SpaceX's

06:46Starlink satellites. That was one thing that happened and on top of that as well there's a

06:52potential risk that internet like the internet in general especially in the United States

06:59could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm because a lot of these cables run underwater through like

07:06like latitudes that would be affected by it and like you would have a geomagnetic storm they're

07:12not shielded so they would basically be probably quite severely affected by this. But as is the

07:17case with a lot of things and how they're done with like legislation it's like earthquakes it

07:23doesn't often get legislated for until the worst has already happened. Yeah that's a shame I mean

07:28I really like the internet I really I like to keep it around this is how we get to communicate right.

07:34But you're saying that we have protections now. So most I think most like power

07:42companies 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

07:52middle of a coronal mass ejection you have to wait a few weeks for them to fix this to power

07:55the underwater cables. Yeah and and luckily Earth you know we have this nice electromagnetic shield

08:02right already built in otherwise we'd be you know goners you know. Yeah it would fry us and it would

08:06also fry our atmosphere like a big reason why Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere for instance

08:11it doesn't really have a very active magnetic field so all of those all of the atmosphere when

08:17when it gets hit by this these wave of like hydrogen like particles protons like the

08:23atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly. Poor Mars, poor Mars. Yeah but that's why we're here

08:29right we're not we're not I mean we are on Mars but you know not yet not yet not yet. Well so

08:36is there a way to know when things like this will happen I know we watch the sun we have video of

08:41the sun it seems more like after the fact. Yeah so you get a bit of advanced warning like for instance

08:49the Great Carrington event is named after Richard Carrington who spotted like intense solar flares

08:55in the sky like a few like a few hours like maybe about 15 hours before the actual like event hit

09:02but the sun is quite a complex object like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields

09:08it's still really really hard for scientists to predict what's going on there. Yeah if only if

09:13well until until the next major astronomical event thanks so much Ben. Thank you.

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