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SALT LAKE CITY -- There's tornadoes, like the one that hit downtown Salt Lake City in 1999, and then there's tornadoes, like the giant F5 that hit Manitoba in 2007. And then there's the great great granddaddy of all the vicious twisters in the solar system, like the one you can find spinning on the surface of the Sun.
Scientists at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales capture images of a monstrous tornado-like prominence on the Sun, spinning at 186,000 mph and 2,000,000 degrees Kelvin, and stretching over size of five Earths. That's one twister that not even Bill Paxton would want to study up close.
Fortunately, solar scientist Xing Li had access to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a billion dollar spacecraft that can study the Sun from a safe distance in orbit around the Earth.
"This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado is filmed by an imager," Li said at the National Assembly Meeting in the UK.
He and his cohorts recorded the event over three or so hours in September of 2011. They think that it has some relationship to coronal mass ejections or CMES, which can wreak havoc when ejected particles collide with our planet.
"These tornadoes may help to produce favorable conditions for CMEs to occur," Li told MSNBC. The tornado coincided with CMEs that were recorded by others.
Solar events like this are called prominences, and they result from the powerful magnetic fields that roar all around the Sun. Superheated plasma glows and radiates as it travels along the twisting magnetic lines flowing around the Sun. Li and his team think that these magnetic fields play an important role in creating CMEs.
Understanding CMEs is becoming more and more crucial as we begin to rely on technologies that are sensitive to spikes in solar radiation. Being able to predict would be very useful in preparing for their effects on the Earth, and avoiding disruptions in services like electricity and cell phone service.
