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Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)
August 7 , 2023
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- A coronal mass ejection (CME) exploded from the Sun recently.
- This time it was spread so wide that it was detected on both Mars and Earth.
- This is the first time that a solar event was recorded on Earth, on the Moon and on Mars simultaneously.
- The two planets were on opposite sides of the Sun, around 250 million kilometres apart.
- Yet they still received the blast of energetic particles.
- Neither the Moon nor Mars generate their own magnetic fields.
- And therefore, solar particles can easily reach their surfaces.
- However, Mars does have a thin atmosphere
- It stops a lot of the lower-energy solar particles and slows down the higher-energy ones.
- 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).
- It is stronger than the background solar wind interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength.
- CMEs travel outward from the Sun at speeds ranging from slower than 250 kilometers per second (km/s) to as fast as near 3000 km/s.
- The fastest Earth-directed CMEs can reach our planet in as little as 15-18 hours.
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