What Makes a Cannibal Coronal Mass Ejection

What Makes a "cannibal coronal mass ejection (CME)".

Transcript

00:00 Cannibal corona mass ejection.

00:03 Yeah.

00:03 That sounds a little terrifying.

00:05 I mean, it's kind of funny, right?

00:06 Because like, just soon as we get over one kind of corona, we get hit by another.

00:09 But like, this this one, like a cannibal coronal mass ejection, like if I break that down for you, it's caused by sunspots.

00:17 So there's a sunspot on the sun called like AR 2975 right now.

00:21 And what it's been doing over the last, say, like few days is producing up to 17 solar eruptions,

00:29 two of which were headed straight towards us.

00:33 Now, one of them was traveling faster than the other.

00:36 It was the one just like that came just after the first one that was emitted.

00:42 Now, when that second sun, like the coronal mass ejection, caught up with the first, it cannibalized it.

00:50 It swept it all up into this one big wave of like these charged particles.

00:55 And then they all swept towards the earth.

00:57 And then when they hit it, they caused a geomagnetic storm.

01:01 Where they come from in how sunspots are created is magnetic fields are created on the sun.

01:07 Like the sun is just a giant ball of plasma.

01:10 So like there's loads of charged particles eddying and moving around on like inside the sun, across the sun's surface.

01:16 Now, when you have charged particles moving, you're going to induce some magnetism there.

01:21 But because magnetic field lines can't cross and you've got all these moving particles,

01:25 like this giant traffic jam of particles moving everywhere,

01:28 you'll inevitably get these field lines bunched up next to each other.

01:31 They'll form into these tight knots that can't escape anywhere else.

01:35 And eventually they will have to snap and release energy.

01:39 Now, they release energy either in the form of a solar flare, like a bright flare of radiation,

01:44 or they'll release energy in the form of like chucking out some of that plasma from the sun.

01:48 What's the difference between solar flares and coronal mass ejections?

01:53 So solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation from that field line snapping that energy release.

02:00 A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup actually being like burped out of the sun.

02:07 I love that phrase, plasma soup.

02:09 Yeah, tasty plasma soup.

02:11 I mean, pretty, but I mean, a little terrifying, right?