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Why is this downvoted? Is it wrong? I do like it as an explanation!


Yeah, it's wrong. There isn't even a single CME strong enough to cause aurora every day, let alone strong enough to cook us, and let alone multiple times per day.


It is wrong. During the peak of the solar activity cycle, the sun produces about 3 coronal mass ejections a day. During the bottom of the cycle, though, it only produces one about once every 5 days. They do sometimes hit the Earth, too. The largest known was the Carrington Event in 1859, which started some of the US telegraph network on fire. There was one in 1989 as well.

I don't know that there has ever been a CME strong enough to cook all animals on the side of Earth facing the sun, though. The sun is pretty far away and Earth has a nice magnetosphere that is one of the reasons life exists in the first place. It protects us from stuff like this.

Incidentally, a CME cooking the entire Earth was the plot of a pretty terrible Nic Cage movie called Knowing a decade or so back.


I'm not sure about the cooking power but in terms of the scale of things, if the earth were a golf ball, a 2000km wide coronal mass ejection would indeed be like shooting a bullet in a random direction at a golf ball half a kilometer away.




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