With all my talk of a CME, figured Id answer the question What IS a CME? for those who dont tune into my space weather ramblings. A Coronal Mass Ejection, or abbreviated CME, is a large cloud of plasma that is ejected from the surface of the sun during energetic events such as a solar flare. The sun isnt made of a state of matter that a lot of us on Earth get to mess with very often. The sun is a plasma, which is very similar to a gas in many regards except for how it interacts with a magnetic field. The sun creates its own magnetic field that stretches way past the boundaries of Pluto. The edge of the suns magnetic field essentially defines where the end of our solar system lies. Anyway, this cloud of plasma then expands outwards into space and can interact with other planets inert magnetic fields themselves, which in a way causes the majestic northern lights that the polar latitudes are lucky enough to see and even pushes them further south for a short period of time. The video attached is taken from a spacecraft that looks at the sun at all times. The suns disc is blocked by the circle so that we can see plasma clouds like this one launching from the surface. This CME was just launched earlier today during a very energetic flare, the CME being the black and white areas in the top left which represent denser plasma from the ambient background. This CME blasted off at 1500 km/s, or over three and a half MILLION miles per hour.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 23:42:26 +0000
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