Solar Tornado : What is going on here?

[Maol]

Rhetorical question, I know, but explain this localized anomaly in EU terms.

https://www.spaceweather.com/images2023 ... do_opt.gif

SOLAR TORNADO: For much of the past week, astronomers have been watching a collossal "solar tornado" dance near the sun's North Pole. "This thing was twisting and growing for 3 days," says Apollo Lasky of Naperville, Illinois, who made the following movie using images from SDO

"I've never seen anything like it in all my years of watching the sun," he says. "It never stops--amazing!"

Unlike tornadoes on Earth, which are shaped by wind, tornadoes on the sun are controlled by magnetism. Solar magnetic fields twist in a furious spiral, dragging clouds of plasma around with them.

This particular twister finally overtorqued itself. On March 18th it spun out https://www.spaceweather.com/images2023 ... _strip.gif
and hurled a cloud
https://www.spaceweather.com/images2023 ... e_lab2.jpg
of magnetized gas into space. The show is over! Ejecta from the unraveling is flying up from the sun's North Pole and will not hit Earth.

https://www.spaceweather.com/archive.ph ... &year=2023

[nick c]

That is an excellent video. But this is nothing new, nor is it unusual, though this example was long lasting.

Here is a 2012 article from National Geographic:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... nce-nature

And on a similar topic, a 2004 TPOD:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/ ... ornado.htm

[jacmac]

Maol

Unlike tornadoes on Earth, which are shaped by wind, tornadoes on the sun are controlled by magnetism. Solar magnetic fields twist in a furious spiral, dragging clouds of plasma around with them.

It looks to me more like a dust devil. We have them often in the dry desert areas of the South West.
They are MUCH smaller than a tornado. You might see one crossing your own yard, or across an open field.
A typical footprint might be the size of a car or sometimes larger.
They pick up the dirt and debris from the ground and spiral it up into the atmosphere hundreds of feet.
Because there are "Dust Devils" on Mars, with a very thin atmosphere, I would say that they are not shaped by the winds
or by rising hot air, but are shaped by electromagnetic forces or currents.
As nick shows, they are not a new phenomenon.

[Maol]

I wasn't suggesting it was a new phenomenon, just though it would be an interesting topic of discussion.

Notice the two streamers emanating from it toward the lower left, apparently connecting, or at least moving toward, to two smaller tornado like structures.

Would anyone hazard a guess what direction it it rotating, CW or CCW, viewed from above.

Assuming rotation is obeying the Right Hand Rule it suggest a very large current is passing in or out of the Sun through that mass of plasma.

If you right click and select "open image in new tab" you can press Ctrl and roll the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in on it.