Solar Tornado : What is going on here?
Posted: Mon Mar 20, 2023 4:28 am
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
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