What Makes a Cannibal Coronal Mass Ejection

Live Science

What Makes a "cannibal coronal mass ejection (CME)".

Transcript

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 magnetic fields

01:06are 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 inside the sun, across the sun surface.

01:17Now, when you have charged particles moving,

01:18you're going to induce some magnetism there.

01:20But because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles,

01:24like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere,

01:27you'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.

01:34And eventually they will have to snap and release energy.

01:38Now they release energy,

01:39either in the form of a solar flare, like a bright flare of radiation,

01:43or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some 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 from that field line,

01:58snapping that energy release.

02:00A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being like burped out of the sun.

02:06I love that phrase, plasma soup.

02:08Mm-hmm. Yeah.

02:09Wow.

02:10Tasty plasma soup.

02:11I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?

02:17I mean...

Category

Transcript

Recommended