What is a CME from the Sun?
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun’s corona. They can eject billions of tons of coronal material and carry an embedded magnetic field (frozen in flux) that is stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength.
What is the current sunspot activity?
Solar cycle 25 is the current solar cycle, the 25th since 1755, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began. It began in December 2019 with a smoothed minimum sunspot number of 1.8. It is expected to continue until about 2030.
What time is the solar flare today?
M3. 9 solar flare at 13:55 UTC.
How well does the CME activity follow the solar cycle?
Conclusions. Cme activity should follow rather closely the sunspot cycle, but the correlation in exact counts may not be precise. This is probably because CMEs happen in layers of the Sun that are much higher above the solar surface than the sunspots.
What happens during a CME?
During a CME, enormous bubbles of superheated gas – called plasma – are ejected from the sun. Over the course of several hours, a billion tons of material are lifted off the sun’s surface and accelerated to speeds of a million miles per hour (1.6 million kilometers per hour).
How many sunspots are on the sun right now?
Current trends point to the sun having about 125 sunspots when cycle 25 peaks.
How long would a CME last?
three to four days
A: A coronal mass ejection can make the 93-million-mile journey to Earth in just three to four days. This implies an average speed of about one million miles per hour.
What is a cannibal CME?
Cannibal coronal mass ejections happen when fast-moving solar eruptions overtake earlier eruptions in the same region of space, sweeping up charged particles to form a giant, combined wavefront that triggers a powerful geomagnetic storm.
What would happen if Earth was hit by a CME?
If a CME collides with the Earth, it causes a geomagnetic storm, and the US-based Space Weather Prediction Center under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released a warning about a possible G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storm.
What would happen if we had a Carrington Event today?
In the wake of a Carrington-like event today, entire power grids could shut down and GPS satellites could be knocked offline.