What Makes Auroras?

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

Transcript

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

00:06that energy release. A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being

00:12like burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup. Yeah, tasty plasma soup. I mean,

00:19pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right? I mean, does it affect Earth? Um, so it does,

00:29but not in like a, so not in a, in an always really terrible way. Most of the time,

00:36the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field, which is really, really good news for us because

00:41it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed

00:46out at us. Um, in this case at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour, which is just,

00:51I guess, 33 times less than the speed of light pretty quick. Um, so what the earth's magnetic

00:58field will do is it will absorb all of these particles. The energy will go into stretching

01:04out the magnetic field in space. So it's like, it's kind of bunched out towards the, it gives

01:10it a long tail. Um, and then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they

01:18will like go downwards and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere. And when these,

01:24when these, um, molecules in the atmosphere then give out light, um, to, in order to kind of go down

01:30to a lower energy level, that's what, why we see the Aurora. Now, because there's so many of these

01:36like particles coming in, you're getting auroras much lower down, um, along the Northern hemisphere

01:42than you would normally expect to see. That's, that's, that's, that's a pretty, that's a nice

01:48effect there. Um, and I know that, uh, people had already taken video from it. Uh, this is from,

01:55uh, Manitoba in Canada. Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think

02:03also you could see the Aurora in the U S certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon

02:09over the last few days as well. Oh, right. On a spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing

02:15information from, uh, they showed some pictures purple. I mean, purple, what a, what an aura that

02:22earth is giving off of this Aurora. And you know, I, uh, when you mentioned poles, I'm like, that's why

02:30they're always up there towards the poles. We got to get closer to some poles, Ben.