call the it the carrington event. it was in that corona, we call it a coronal mass ejection, and a huge blob of energy came from the sun and enveloped the earth. some of the telephone lines caught fire there was so much electricity going through the lines. so to try to predict such events leek that, and understand the physics, it isn t just a beautiful human event and exciting to see personally, but it s important scientifically, so everyone is taking, like never before, advantage of this to really try and lead all the information we can. david, the sun is 93 million miles away. the moon is 238,855 miles away, but because of the they re the same angular size in this
what triggers the flares and explosions. if we can get an idea of what triggers them, we can get more of a predictive mechanism for determining the existence of what chris was calling coronal mass ejections. so, david, for all we know about the sun, there s still a lot we don t know about what causes they flares? absolutely. we can now predict some types of flare events, oh, 14 hours in advance, which isn t bad. look at that. here it comes. i love that. we call it bailey s beads, because there was a guy named bailey who first described them, but i element it as the diamond ring effect. you would see that visually for a few nomts in the sky, but you immediately have to put your glasses back on, because you re looking at the full atmosphere
these coronal events. this is about now what s susceptible to this interruption like our satellites. and david, we re looking at blackwell, missouri, where there is totality. just explain for viewers what they are seeing, obviously the moon has moved in front of the sun from our vantage point, but the corona, that is what s coming off the sun all around. you re looking at the structure of the inhe corona. you might consider it the outer atmosphere of the sun. the sun is a globe of glowing gas, it s not a solid surface, so that technically is an atmosphere, but that continues out millions of miles into space. we can only see it in this kind of eclipse when the great brilliance of the visible surface is blocked out. you know why that occurs. the moon itself didn t give off
special and unusual or place is in the universe. this is the only play we know of in the universe where this happens, where the moon happens to be 400 times smaller than the yet 400 times closer to us, and therefore giving us an amazing show. i m taken aback by this internal tug, whiches what made i experience so special. david dvoraken, for you what stands out? what really stands out for me, we experienced the progress. thank to cnn. it s an experience to see the ubiquity to see the excitement across the united states, and see the sun changing in subtle ways it certainly took me.
living up to the stature of the office he holds. david, thank you. i want to now bring in jack murphy. thanks so much for being with us. thanks for having me. i wonder what you are looking to hear tonight. well, i think unfortunately my expectations are he s going to announce yet another troop surge. this has been tried again and again and again, but we learned well over a decade ago surging more troops in doesn t mean there will be more targets, doesn t mean more actionable intelligence to act on. what another troop surge will accomplish in afc i don t really know. i don t think really anyone understands. so much of the focus has been on training afghan forces having by those just, you know, i