What Makes Auroras?
What's the difference between a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection? And how do they lead to auroras?
Transcript
00:00 Solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation from that field line snapping
00:06 that energy release. A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's plasma soup actually being
00:12 burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup. Yeah, tasty plasma soup. I mean, pretty,
00:20 but I mean a little terrifying, right? I mean, does it affect Earth?
00:28 So it does, but not in like a, so not in an always really terrible way. Most of the time,
00:36 the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic field, which is really, really good news for us,
00:41 because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles that the sun has just
00:46 spewed out at us. In this case, at like speeds of like 2 million miles per hour, which is just,
00:51 I guess, 33 times less than the speed of light. Pretty quick. So what the Earth's magnetic field
00:58 will do is it will absorb all of these particles. The energy will go into stretching out the
01:04 magnetic field in space. So it's like it's kind of bunched out towards the, it gives it a long tail.
01:11 And then most of those particles will gather kind of towards the poles where they will like go
01:18 downwards and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere. And when these, when these
01:25 molecules in the atmosphere then give out light to in order to kind of go down to a lower energy
01:31 level, that's what why we see the aurora. Now, because there's many of these like particles
01:37 coming in, you're getting auroras much lower down along the northern hemisphere than you
01:43 would normally expect to see. That's, that's, that's, that's a pretty, that's a nice effect
01:48 there. And I know that people had already taken video from it. This is from Manitoba in Canada.
01:57 Beautiful, just absolutely beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like I think also you could see the
02:04 aurora in the US certainly like as far south as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last
02:09 two days as well. Oh right, on spaceweather.com that you guys were sharing information from,
02:16 they showed some pictures. Purple, I mean purple, what a, what an aura that Earth is giving off
02:23 of this aurora. And you know, I, when you mentioned poles, I'm like that's why they're
02:30 always up there towards the poles. We got to get closer to some poles then.