Maedot Tinsae Ayalew
7th Grade, Kenmore Middle School
Arlington, VA
Maedot has always wanted to see the Aurora Borealis, or northern lights. “Despite my many attempts, I haven’t seen the northern lights,” she says. “This led me to the next best thing, research.” The Aurora Borealis is caused by coronal mass ejections (CMEs), clouds of plasma and magnetic fields spurting from the Sun’s corona. While they create a beautiful light show in places like Alaska, CMEs can also take out satellites and increase cancer risk for astronauts. Maedot decided to find out what time of year CMEs were at their strongest.
The Effects of Seasonal Variation on the Kinematics of Coronal Mass Ejections
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Project Background
Maedot worked with a free database from the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. This instrument has been collecting data from CMEs since 1996. Maedot looked at the CME data for each month from 2018-2022. For each CME in the database, she took three measurements and used a mathematical formula to determine the CME’s velocity and acceleration.
Maedot showed that the velocity of the CME’s was highest in the fall, and next highest in the spring, but the acceleration of the CME’s was highest in the spring, and next highest in the fall. The spring and fall are when the Earth and Sun’s magnetic fields are most closely aligned. “CMEs cause great damage to satellites,” Maedot says. CME’s can also harm astronauts. “By knowing what seasons have the greatest kinematics of CMEs, scientists can avoid those time periods.”
Beyond the Project
“Soccer has improved many parts of my life,” Maedot says. “I have to think quickly and make decisions in the moment.” She is also learning Amharic, the language her family spoke in Ethiopia. Maedot moved to the U.S. when she was three. “I’m still on my journey of relearning how to speak my native tongue, a part of me that I regret losing,” she says. Maedot wants to be an astrophysicist. “The universe has always held a sort of wonder to me.”
