What's the difference between a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection? And how do they lead to auroras?
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00 Solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation
00:03 from that field line snapping that energy release.
00:07 A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's plasma soup
00:11 actually being burped out of the sun.
00:13 I love that phrase, plasma soup.
00:15 - Yeah, tasty plasma soup. - Wow, I hear the nice...
00:18 I mean, pretty, but a little terrifying, right?
00:24 I mean, does it affect Earth?
00:28 So it does, but not in like a...
00:31 So not in an always really terrible way.
00:34 Most of the time, the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field,
00:39 which is really, really good news for us
00:41 because it protects us from all of these
00:42 like highly energized particles that the sun has just spewed out at us.
00:47 In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour,
00:50 which is just I guess 33 times less than the speed of light.
00:54 Pretty quick.
00:56 So what the Earth's magnetic field will do
00:59 is it will absorb all of these particles.
01:02 The energy will go into stretching out the magnetic field in space.
01:06 So it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the...
01:09 It gives it a long tail.
01:12 And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles
01:17 where they will like go downwards
01:19 and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.
01:24 And when these molecules in the atmosphere then give out light
01:29 in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level,
01:31 that's why we see the aurora.
01:33 Now, because there's so many of these like particles coming in,
01:38 you're getting auroras much lower down along the Northern Hemisphere
01:42 than you would normally expect to see.
01:45 That's a pretty... That's a nice effect there.
01:49 And I know that people had already taken video from it.
01:54 This is from Manitoba in Canada.
01:59 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful.
02:01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:02 And like I think also you could see the aurora in the US
02:05 certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oregon
02:09 over the last few days as well.
02:11 Oh, right. On spaceweather.com
02:13 that you guys were sharing information from,
02:17 they showed some pictures.
02:18 Purple, I mean purple.
02:20 What an aura that Earth is giving off of this aurora.
02:25 And you know, when you mentioned poles,
02:29 I'm like, that's why they're always up there towards the poles.
02:32 We got to get closer to some poles then.