SOLAR TORNADO

[Raindrops]

This caught my eye today in the news.

SOLAR TORNADO

For much of the past week, astronomers have been watching a colossal "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 NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory: (see images below, Taken by Efrain Morales Rivera and SOHO).

"I've never seen anything like it in all my years of watching the sun," he says. "It was twisting and growing nonstop for 3 days."

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. They are seen from time to time.

This twister finally overtorqued itself. On March 18th it spun out and hurled a cloud of magnetized gas into space. The unraveling debris is flying up from the sun's North Pole and will not hit Earth.

Edited March 21, 2023 by Raindrops