What Makes Auroras?

What's the difference between a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection? And how do they lead to auroras?

Transcript

00:00Solar flares is just the bright flash that you'll see of radiation

00:04and from that from that field line snapping that energy release.

00:07A coronal mass ejection is some of the sun's like plasma soup

00:11actually being like burped out of the sun. I love that phrase plasma soup.

00:16Mm-hmm yeah tasty plasma soup. I mean pretty but I mean a little terrifying

00:24right? I mean does it affect Earth?

00:27Um so it does but not in like a so not in an always really terrible way.

00:35Most of the time the Earth has a pretty strong magnetic

00:38field which is really really good news for us

00:41because it protects us from all of these like highly energized particles

00:45that the sun has just spewed out at us. In this case at like speeds of like 2

00:49million miles per hour which is just I guess

00:5233 times less than the speed of light. Pretty quick.

00:55Um so what the Earth's magnetic field will do

00:59is it will absorb all of these particles. The energy will go into

01:03stretching out the magnetic field in space. So it's like it's kind of

01:08bunched out towards the it gives it a long tail.

01:11Um and then most of those particles will gather

01:16kind of towards the poles where they will like go downwards

01:19and then energize some of the molecules in the atmosphere.

01:24And when these when these um molecules in the atmosphere then give out light

01:28um in order to kind of go down to a lower energy level

01:32that's what why we see the aurora. Now because there's many of these like

01:36particles coming in you're getting auroras much lower down

01:41um along the northern hemisphere than you

01:43know would normally expect to see. That's that's that's that's a pretty

01:47that's a nice effect there. Um and I know that uh people had

01:52already taken video from it. Uh this is from uh Manitoba in Canada.

01:59Beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful. Yeah yeah yeah and like I think also

02:04you could see the aurora in the U.S. certainly like as far south as

02:07Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon over the last two days

02:10as well. Oh right on spaceweather.com that you

02:14guys were sharing information from uh they showed

02:17some pictures. Purple. I mean purple. What a what an

02:21aura that earth is giving off of this aurora.

02:25And you know I uh when you mention poles I'm like that's why they're always up

02:30there towards you. We got to get closer to some

02:33poles then.