Hi Carissa,

This is a fantastic question that solar physicists have been trying to figure out for decades! We do know that coronal mass ejections are driven by magnetic energy release, but the exact cause isn't completely understood. The huge number of magnetic fields origniating from the sun get all twisted up because of how the sun rotates and how the plasma flows (the sun is not rigid like the earth), which can cause the field lines to interact and release an enormous amount of energy and mass into space. We would like to predict when coronal mass ejections are going to occur so we can protect astronauts and our satellites from the onslaught of the storms, but we are still in the stages of understanding the fundamental physics behind their initiation and evolution.... hopefully in a few years we will know much more about what causes these storms!

Cheers,

Holly

Hi Carissa,

That is a good question and one that scientists are struggling to answer. If we knew what caused them we could start trying to predict them and that would make a lot of people (like astronauts, people launching rockets, and the power companies - all of which can be affected by space weather which is often connected to coronal mass ejections) happy.

At this point our best guess is that magnetic field lines on the Sun get twisted up enough that there is a lot of energy looking for a release. In an effort to simplify the tangle of field lines, lines that are close to each other but pointed in opposite directions 'reconnect'. You can kind of visualize it this way: take a red piece of rope and a blue piece of rope and cross them like an X. Now glue them together at the crossing spot in the middle and then carefully cut that glue spot in half so that now you have two separate pieces of rope again, but they are each half blue and half red. When this happens with magnetic field lines it can disconnect certain lines from the Sun, release a bunch of energy and eventually cause a coronal mass ejection to be pushed out from the Sun.

How and when this whole thing gets started and how big the coronal mass ejection will be is something that a lot of people are trying to figure out by making mathematical calculations, using computer simulations, and watching the Sun with different kinds of instruments.

Best,

Christina