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 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 part 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
01:45traffic jam of particles moving everywhere you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next
01:49to each other they'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else and eventually
01:55they will have to snap and release energy now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare
02:00like a bright flare of radiation or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out
02:06some of that plasma from the sun what's the difference between solar flares and ronal mass ejections so
02:12solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation and from that from that field line
02:17snapping that energy release a coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually
02:24being like burped out of the sun i love that phrase plasma soup mm-hmm yeah tasty nice uh i mean pretty
02:33but i mean a little terrifying right i mean does it affect earth um so it does but not in like a
02:42so not in a in an always really terrible way most of the time the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field
02:51which is really really 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 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
03:25most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and then
03:32energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere and when these when these um molecules in the atmosphere then give out light
03:40light um to in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level that's what why we see the aurora now
03:46because there's so many of these like particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower down
03:53um along the northern hemisphere than you would normally expect to see
03:56that's that's that's that's that's a pretty that's a nice effect there um and i know that
04:02uh people had already taken video from it uh this is from manitoba in canada beautiful just absolutely
04:12beautiful yeah yeah yeah and like i think also you could see the aurora in the us certainly like as far
04:18south as pennsylvania iowa and oregon over the last two days as well oh right on uh spaceweather.com
04:25that you guys were sharing information from uh they showed some pictures purple i mean purple what a
04:33what an aura that earth is giving off of this aurora and you know i uh when you mentioned poles i'm like
04:41that's why they're always up there towards yeah we got to get closer to some poles ben yeah yeah but so
04:47okay so that's the good what uh how about damage okay yes so damage um so they can cause damage so
04:59one of the most recent kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this type was um in the
05:06was the 1989 quebec power cut which was caused by a geomagnetic storm now most of the time especially
05:13when it comes 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 diverts
05:24the energy or they also have like other techniques that allow them to kind of siphon
05:29off excess energy that might be given to power lines by storms like this okay but like that
05:34hasn't always been the case like especially back in 1859 there was a really big event called the great
05:40carrington event um 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 really
05:52documenting it and we didn't have many electronics around so we didn't really care um but in this case
05:59the great carrington event fried most of the telegram systems in the us and in europe that had been
06:05developed at the time and it also led to auroras that could be seen around like as far south as the
06:12caribbean um and like there were people waking up at night thinking that like thinking that it was
06:18daytime in the caribbean because of these enormous auroras from this event i mean we we're freaked out about it
06:25now 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 on top of
06:50that as well there's a potential risk um that internet like the internet in general especially
06:58in the united states could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm because a lot of these cables
07:03run underwater through like like latitudes that would be affected by it and like you would have
07:10a geomagnetic storm they're not shielded so they would basically be probably quite severely affected by this
07:16but as is the case with a lot of things and how they're done with legislation it's like earthquakes
07:22it doesn't often get legislated for until the worst has already happened yeah that's a shame i mean i
07:28really like 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
07:48going to be getting any like um i guess coronal mass ejection memes in the middle of a coronal mass
07:52ejection you have to wait a few weeks for them to fix this to power the underwater cables yeah and and
07:58luckily earth 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
08:08why mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere for instance it doesn't really have a very active
08:13um magnetic field so all of those all of the atmosphere when when it gets hit by this these
08:18wave of like hydrogen like particles protons um like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly
08:25poor mars poor mars yeah but that's why we're here right we're not we're not i mean we are on mars but
08:31you know yeah yeah not yet not yet not yet well so is there a way to know when things like this
08:39will happen i know we watch the sun we have video of the sun it seems more like after the fact
08:46yeah so you get a bit of advanced warning like for instance the great carrington event is named after
08:51richard carrington who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky like a few like a few hours like
08:58maybe 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
09:09predict what's going on there yeah if only if only well until until the next major astronomical event
09:18thanks so much ben thank you
Comments