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