Coronal mass ejection

Hmm

... which was a giant solar flare in the, uh, mid-19th century, and that hit Earth with a CME.

What's CME?

A coronal mass ejection.

So when there's a solar flare, it has a coronal mass ejection.

[laughs]

Um, where all the electrics would go.

However, a CME would be anything that's mains wired into the, the grid.

Yeah.

On the other hand, it isn't, isn't a fuss that there's, there's very little radiocarbon signature of the biggest ever solar events, and that's 'cause most of the particles from those CMEs don't actually reach the Earth, and so they don't produce radiation in the upper atmosphere that would produce this radiocarbon.

So on the other hand, there's these other types of solar events called solar energetic particle events, SEP events, or solar proton events, where the sun releases beams of high energy particles, and they can totally do this, and you and I don't notice that they're going on.

They certainly cause problems for satellites.

It completed the 93 million mile journey to Earth in just over eight minutes.

Now, writing right behind it is the cannonball, a coronal mass ejection.

Sometimes you'll see this written as CME.

It's billions of tons of superheated, magnetized plasma.

Now, normally a solar cycle drifts across space and takes three to four days to reach us.

This is a coronal mass ejection, and it is one of the most powerful phenomena in the solar system.

A single CME can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field, a mass equivalent to billions of times the mass of a mountain on Earth.

During the active period in May 2024, the Sun launched seven waves of powerful CMEs in quick succession toward Earth.

As it travels through space, it expands enormously.

By the time it reaches Earth, a CME that started as a confined structure on the Sun has become an enormous bubble of plasma, sometimes millions of miles across.

The faster polar wind creates a kind of wind shear that causes the slower equatorial wind to pile up and get compressed.

This creates what is called a Corotating Interaction Region, or CIR.

When one of these regions passes Earth, it too can trigger geomagnetic storms, though generally less intense than those caused by CMEs.

And so Jupiter has very strong radio emissions from its interactions with this moon.

And then our Sun itself also has interactions and it throws off CMEs and things like that that impact Earth and have various emissions there.

You can imagine in some kind of exoplanet system something similar happens where you have either an exoplanet which has an exomoon on it and being able to detect that there is a moon circling that planet because there is modulated emission coming off of it.

Or you have the star being very active, throwing off a large CME and impacting a planet with a magnetic field there and being able to directly see that.

Since

you're an expert, what makes you think that it was certainly a cosmic impact versus something like a massive CME event that affected the magnetosphere of the Earth? I don't think

there's any good science to support

that.

Right.

And get it into published papers and work your ass off and publish 65 papers with forensic evidence.

Well aware of all the CME stuff.

Richard Firestone led with it was a Micronova.

Organic computing, etc.

6.9 magnitude solar flare with an Earth-directed CME.

A G2 geomagnetic storm watch was issued.

Again, power outages from natural or man-made solar flare.