- 3 years ago
After Northern Lights appeared as far south as Colorado, Live Science discusses how "cannibal" coronal mass ejections (CME) are formed and what impact they have on Earth.
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00:00 There are some beautiful auroras happening
00:02 in the Northwest of America right now.
00:04 - Yeah, so like NOAA scientists have given this
00:07 a really, really simple explanation
00:09 and it's called like a cannibal coronal mass ejection.
00:14 That's the thing that's causing
00:16 all of these auroras going on right now.
00:19 - Cannibal corona mass ejection.
00:22 - Yeah.
00:22 - That sounds a little terrifying.
00:23 - Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny, right?
00:25 Because like just soon as we get over one kind of corona,
00:27 we get hit by another.
00:28 But like this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection,
00:32 like if I break that down for you,
00:34 it's caused by sunspots.
00:35 So there's a sunspot on the sun called like AR2975
00:40 right now.
00:40 - Okay.
00:41 - And what it's been doing over the last,
00:43 say like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions,
00:48 two of which have headed straight towards us.
00:52 Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.
00:55 It was the one just like that came just after
00:59 the first one that was emitted.
01:01 Now, when that second sun, like coronal mass ejection,
01:06 caught up with the first, it cannibalized it.
01:09 It swept it all up into this one big wave
01:11 of like these charged particles.
01:14 And then they all swept towards the earth.
01:16 And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.
01:20 Where they come from in how sunspots are created
01:23 is magnetic fields are created on the sun.
01:26 Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.
01:28 So like there's loads of charged particles
01:31 eddying and moving around on like inside the sun,
01:34 across the sun's surface.
01:35 Now, when you have charged particles moving,
01:38 you're gonna induce some magnetism there.
01:40 But because magnetic field lines can't cross
01:42 and you've got all these moving particles,
01:44 like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere,
01:47 you'll inevitably get these field lines
01:49 bunched up next to each other.
01:50 They'll form into these tight knots
01:52 that can't escape anywhere else.
01:54 And eventually they will have to snap and release energy.
01:58 Now they release energy either in the form of a solar flare,
02:00 like a bright flare of radiation,
02:03 or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out
02:06 some of that plasma from the sun.
02:07 - What's the difference between solar flares
02:10 and coronal mass ejections?
02:11 - So solar flares is just the bright flash
02:14 that you'll see of radiation.
02:16 - Okay.
02:16 - From that field line snapping that energy release.
02:19 A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's
02:22 plasma soup actually being burped out of the sun.
02:25 - I love that phrase, plasma soup.
02:27 - Mm-hmm, yeah.
02:29 Tasty plasma soup.
02:30 - I hear the nice, I mean, pretty,
02:33 but I mean, a little terrifying, right?
02:36 I mean, does it affect earth?
02:38 - So it does, but not in like a,
02:43 so not in an always really terrible way.
02:46 Most of the time,
02:48 the earth has a pretty strong magnetic field,
02:51 which is really, really good news for us
02:53 because it protects us from all of these
02:55 like highly energized particles that the sun
02:57 has just spewed out at us.
02:59 In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour
03:02 which is just, I guess, 33 times less
03:05 than the speed of light, pretty quick.
03:08 So what the earth's magnetic field will do
03:11 is it will absorb all of these particles.
03:14 The energy will go into stretching out
03:16 the magnetic field in space.
03:18 So it's like, it's kind of bunched out towards the,
03:21 it gives it a long tail.
03:24 And then most of those particles will gather
03:27 kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards
03:31 and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.
03:36 And when these molecules in the atmosphere
03:39 then give out light in order to kind of go down
03:42 to a lower energy level, that's why we see the aurora.
03:45 Now, because there's so many of these like particles
03:49 coming in, you're getting auroras much lower down
03:53 along the Northern hemisphere
03:54 than you would normally expect to see.
03:56 - That's a pretty, that's a nice effect there.
04:01 And I know that people had already taken video from it.
04:06 This is from Manitoba in Canada.
04:10 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful.
04:13 - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
04:14 And like, I think also you could see the aurora
04:17 in the US certainly like as far South as Pennsylvania,
04:20 Iowa and Oregon over the last few days as well.
04:23 - Oh, right, on spaceweather.com
04:25 that you guys were sharing information from,
04:29 they showed some pictures, purple.
04:31 I mean, purple, what an aura that Earth is giving off
04:35 of this aurora.
04:37 And you know, when you mentioned poles,
04:41 I'm like, that's why they're always up there towards the poles.
04:44 We gotta get closer to some poles, Ben.
04:46 - Yeah, yeah.
04:46 - But so, okay, so that's the good.
04:49 How about damage?
04:53 - Okay, yes, so damage.
04:56 So they can cause damage.
04:58 So one of the most recent kind of power outages
05:02 that was caused by a storm of this type
05:05 was the 1989 Quebec power cut,
05:09 which was caused by a geomagnetic storm.
05:11 Now, most of the time,
05:12 especially when it comes to people who provide
05:14 like power lines and stuff,
05:15 a lot of them have shielded like their power cables
05:20 and things like that with a kind of Faraday cage basically,
05:23 which diverts the energy,
05:24 or they also have like other techniques
05:27 that allow them to kind of siphon off excess energy
05:29 that might be given to power lines by storms like this.
05:33 - Okay.
05:34 - But like that hasn't always been the case,
05:35 like especially back in 1859,
05:38 there was a really big event
05:39 called the Great Carrington Event,
05:41 which was the largest sort of solar storm
05:44 in modern human history.
05:45 I'm sure there have been solar storms
05:47 just as large throughout our past,
05:50 but like before that point,
05:52 we weren't really documenting it
05:53 and we didn't have many electronics around,
05:55 so we didn't really care.
05:56 But in this case, the Great Carrington Event
06:00 fried most of the telegram systems in the US and in Europe
06:04 that had been developed at the time.
06:06 And it also led to auroras
06:09 that could be seen around like as far south
06:11 as the Caribbean.
06:13 And like there were people waking up at night
06:16 thinking that it was daytime in the Caribbean
06:20 because of these enormous auroras from this event.
06:23 - I mean, we're freaked out about it now
06:25 when we see things like that.
06:26 We know more, but I can't even imagine,
06:28 you know, over a hundred years ago.
06:30 - Yeah, yeah, exactly.
06:32 In terms of more modern sort of phenomena
06:35 that have caused more modern damage,
06:37 other than the Quebec event,
06:39 recently actually there was another geomagnetic storm
06:42 that caused the downing of 40,
06:44 like 40 of SpaceX's Starlink satellites.
06:48 That was one thing that happened.
06:50 And on top of that as well,
06:51 there's a potential risk that internet,
06:56 like the internet in general,
06:57 especially in the United States,
06:59 could be cut out by a geomagnetic storm
07:02 because a lot of these cables run underwater
07:05 through like latitudes that would be affected by it.
07:09 And like you would have a geomagnetic storm,
07:12 they're not shielded.
07:13 So they would basically be probably
07:15 quite severely affected by this.
07:16 But as is the case with a lot of things
07:19 and how they're done with legislation,
07:21 it's like earthquakes.
07:22 It doesn't often get legislated for
07:24 until the worst has already happened.
07:26 - Yeah, that's a shame.
07:27 I mean, I really like the internet.
07:28 I really, I like to keep it around.
07:30 This is how we get to communicate, right?
07:32 - Exactly, yeah, exactly.
07:36 - But you're saying that we have protections now.
07:39 - So I think most like power companies
07:42 have already built in protections into their grids
07:45 for these kinds of things.
07:46 It's just, yeah, you're not gonna be getting any like,
07:49 I guess, coronal mass ejection memes
07:51 in the middle of a coronal mass ejection.
07:53 You have to wait a few weeks for them to fix this,
07:54 the power, the underwater cables.
07:57 - Yeah, and luckily, Earth,
07:59 we have this nice electromagnetic shield, right?
08:02 Already built in otherwise we'd be gone or--
08:05 - Yeah, it would fry us and it would also fry our atmosphere
08:07 like a big reason why Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere
08:10 for instance, it doesn't really have
08:12 very active magnetic field.
08:14 So all of the atmosphere when it gets hit by this wave
08:19 of like hydrogen, like particles, like protons,
08:23 like the atmosphere gets stripped away quite quickly.
08:25 - Poor Mars, poor Mars.
08:27 - Yeah.
08:28 - But that's why we're here, right?
08:29 We're not, I mean, we are on Mars, but not yet.
08:33 - Not yet, not yet.
08:34 Well, so is there a way to know
08:38 when things like this will happen?
08:39 I know we watched the sun, we have video of the sun,
08:42 it seems more like after the fact.
08:44 - Yeah, so you get a bit of advanced warning.
08:48 Like for instance, the Great Carrington Event
08:50 is named after Richard Carrington,
08:52 who spotted like intense solar flares in the sky,
08:56 like a few hours, like maybe about 15 hours
08:59 before the actual like event hit.
09:02 But the sun is quite a complex object,
09:05 like there's loads going on in those magnetic fields.
09:08 It's still really, really hard for scientists
09:09 to predict what's going on there.
09:11 - Yeah, if only, if only.
09:14 Well, until the next major astronomical event,
09:18 thanks so much, Ben.
09:19 - Thank you.
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