Sciency Words: Ejecta

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words. Every Friday, we take a look at a new and interesting scientific term to help us all expand our scientific vocabularies together. Today’s word is:

EJECTA

This is the fancy, technical term for stuff that gets thrown around whenever violent things happen. For example:

• All the stuff that spews out of volcanoes… that’s ejecta.
• When a meteor hits, the debris that gets thrown into the air is ejecta.
• Whenever I get writer’s block, all the crumpled papers strewn around my office are ejecta.

Since we’ll be spending most of January talking about the Sun, I figured this is a term we should all know. The Sun gets pretty violent and produces lots of solar ejecta, which is bad news for anyone who lives in space (it’s not exactly good news if you live on Earth either).