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.
00:09And it's called like a cannibal coronal mass ejection.
00:14That's the thing that's causing all of these auroras going on right now.
00:19Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:22Yeah.
00:22That sounds a little terrifying.
00:24I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
00:25Because like just as soon as we get over one kind of corona, we get hit by another.
00:28But like this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection, like if I break that down for you, it's caused
00:35by sunspots.
00:36So there's a sunspot in the sun called like AR2975 right now.
00:41And what it's been doing over the last, say, like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions, two
00:48of which have headed straight towards us.
00:52Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.
00:55It 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, it cannibalized it.
01:09It swept it all up into this one big wave of like these these charged particles.
01:13And then they all swept towards the Earth.
01:16And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.
01:20What 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.
01:29So like there's loads of charged particles eddying and moving around on like inside the sun across the sun surface.
01:35Now, when you have charged particles moving, you're going to induce some magnetism there.
01:40But because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles, like this giant traffic jam of
01:46particles moving everywhere, you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other.
01:50So they'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else.
01:54And eventually they will have to snap and release energy.
01:58Now, they release energy either in the form of a solar flare, like a bright flare of radiation, or they'll
02:03release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from the sun.
02:07What's the difference between solar flares and coronal mass ejections?
02:12So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation from that from that field line snapping
02:18that energy release.
02:19A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being like burped out of the sun.
02:26I love that phrase plasma soup.
02:28Yeah, tasty plasma soup.
02:31I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?
02:36I mean, does it affect Earth?
02:39So it does, but not in like a, so not in an always really terrible way.
02:47Most of the time, the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field, which is really, really good news for us
02:52because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed out at
02:59us.
02:59In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour, which is just, I guess, 33 times
03:05less than the speed of light.
03:07Pretty quick.
03:08So what the Earth's magnetic field will do is it will absorb all of these particles.
03:14The 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.
03:23And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards and
03:32then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.
03:35And when these, when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light to, in order to kind of go
03:42down to a lower energy level, that's what, why we see the Aurora.
03:45Now, because there's so many of these like particles coming in, you're getting auroras much lower down along the Northern
03:54Hemisphere than you would normally expect to see.
03:57That's, that's, that's, that's a pretty, that's a nice effect there.
04:01And I know that people had already taken video from it.
04:06This is from Manitoba in Canada.
04:11Beautiful.
04:12Just absolutely beautiful.
04:13Yeah, yeah, yeah.
04:14And like, I think also you could see the Aurora in the U.S. certainly like as far south as
04:19Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last two days as well.
04:23Oh, right.
04:24On spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information from, they showed some pictures.
04:30Purple.
04:31I mean, purple.
04:32What a, what an aura that Earth is giving off of this Aurora.
04:37And, you know, I, when you mentioned poles, I'm like, that's why they're always up there towards the poles.
04:44We got to get closer to some poles, Ben.
04:46Yeah, yeah.
04:47But, so, okay.
04:48So that's the good.
04:49What, how about damage?
04:53Okay.
04:54Yes.
04:55So damage.
04:55Um, so they can cause damage.
04:59So one of the most recent kind of power outages that was caused by a storm of this type was
05:05in the, was the 1989 Quebec power cut, which was caused by a geomagnetic storm.
05:11Now, most of the time, especially when it comes to people who provide like power lines and stuff, a lot
05:16of them have shielded like their, their, their, like power cables and things like that with a kind of Faraday
05:22cage, basically, which diverts the energy.
05:24Or they also have like other techniques that allow them to kind of siphon off excess energy that might be
05:30given to power lines by storms like this.
05:33Okay.
05:33But like, that hasn't always been the case.
05:35Like, especially back in 1859, there was a really big event called the Great Carrington event, which was the largest
05:43sort of solar storm in modern human history.
05:45I'm sure there have 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.
05:55So we didn't really care.
05:56Um, but 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.
06:06And it also led to auroras that could be seen around like as far south as the, as the Caribbean.
06:12Um, and like there were people waking up at night thinking that the day, like thinking that it was daytime
06:19in the Caribbean because of these enormous auroras from this event.
06:23I mean, we, we were freaked out about it now when we see things like that, we know more, but
06:27I can't even imagine, you know, over a hundred years ago.
06:30Yeah, yeah, exactly.
06:32In terms of, um, more modern sort of phenomena that have caused more modern damage other than the Quebec event.
06:38Um, recently, actually, uh, there was another geomagnetic storm that caused the downing of, um, 40, like 40 of SpaceX's
06:46Starlink satellites.
06:47That was one thing that happened.
06:49Um, and on top of that as well, there's a potential risk, um, that internet, like the internet in general,
06:58especially in the United States could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm.
07:02Because a lot of these cables run underwater through like, like latitudes that would be affected by it.
07:09And like you would have a geomagnetic storm, they're not shielded.
07:13So 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.
07:23It doesn't often get legislated for until the worst has already happened.
07:26Yeah, that's a shame.
07:27I mean, I really like the internet.
07:29I really, I like to keep it around.
07:31This is how we get to communicate, right?
07:33Exactly.
07:34Um, but, but you're saying that we have protections now.
07:39So most, I think most like power companies have already built in protections into their grids for these kinds of
07:45things.
07:46Because it's just, yeah, you're not going to be getting any like, um, I guess, coronal mass ejection memes in
07:52the middle of a coronal mass ejection.
07:53You have to wait a few weeks for them to fix the stuff out of the underwater cables.
07:57Yeah.
07:57And, and luckily Earth, you know, we have this nice electromagnetic shield, right?
08:02Already built in.
08:03Otherwise we'd be, you know, goners, you know.
08:05Yeah, it would fry us.
08:06And it would also fry our atmosphere.
08:08Like a big reason why Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere, for instance, is it doesn't really have very
08:12active magnetic fields.
08:14So all of those, all of the atmosphere, when, when it gets hit by this, these wave of like hydrogen,
08:20like particles, protons, um, like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly.
08:25Poor Mars.
08:26Poor Mars.
08:27Yeah.
08:28But that's why we're here, right?
08:29We're not, we're not, I mean, we are on Mars, but you know, not yet.
08:33Not yet.
08:33Not yet.
08:34Well, so is there a way to know when things like this will happen?
08:39I know we watched the sun, we have video of the sun.
08:42And it seems more like after the fact.
08:45Yeah.
08:46So you get a bit of advanced warning.
08:49Like for instance, the great Carrington event is named after Richard Carrington, who spotted like intense solar flares in the
08:55sky, 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.
09:05Like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields.
09:07It's still really, really hard for scientists to predict what's going on there.
09:11Yeah.
09:12If only, if only.
09:14Well, until, until the next major astronomical event.
09:18Thanks so much, Ben.
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