Comment on 🌿👀🌿

• ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Clearly so, as you taught me a new definition - vulgarization - the act or process of making something, or of something becoming, better known and understood by ordinary people.

  I appreciate that. Thanks! :) in that definition (and the more traditionally used one) I’m a vulgar mf!

  Unless you want to know about like magnetic tornadoes on the sun or how sponges are colonies of cells often using glass/silicate compounds in various shapes as a common skeleton (wouldn’t want to bathe with those!! But each species has their own unique structure!), I haven’t much off the top of my head without a good conversation to spark some back-of-the brain latent info that’s stored and conversationally relevant. I’m a steel trap for niche science stuff, and it often takes a good conversation to bring it out. How else do you know what info is worth sharing?

  ^_^

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  • Hadriscus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Astronomy is one of my bigger interests, but I don’t know about magnetic tornadoes on the sun. Is that a regular occurrence ? Is the naming a callback to regular tornadoes because they are similar in some way ?

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    • ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They aren’t uncommon persey, it’s just another form of solar prominance, or material lifted above the surface by magnetic field liness. However, the tornado-like appearance rather than a full arc of material that connects to the surface in 2 places is rather uncommon, and it’s even possible that it’s an artifact of the way the sun is photographed (the lenses filter based on temperature, essentially, and material further from the surface may cool to the point it doesn’t get picked up with any of the filters, making it effectively invisible), or the angle at which the photos are taken in relation to the prominence (if we are looking at it head on, we wouldn’t see the second anchor point).

      How they form is an ongoing mystery with many models, like all solar prominences, and it probably isn’t disconnected on one end like a cyclone would be, but visually it resembles a tornado, and the material does rotate around the magnetic field lines, much the same way a tornado rotates in air. We see the same rotation in more typical coronal loops, which are what cause coronal mass ejections when one end or the other releases. They are absolutely massive when they do form, 10+ stacked earths in size, and can last days, weeks, months.

      It’s one of my go-to water-testing facts because almost everyone likes the sun, is at least vaguely familiar with tornadoes, and can envision a “10 earth tall tornado of plasma on the sun”. Which is a damned cool image to envision - the reality is also spectacular but a bit less so.

      The one linked below is actually from March this year, which is neat! I didn’t even know it happened again! This one was 14 earths high and exploded at the end of its cycle! How cool! I hope they got some really good data on how it works! I’ll have to do some looking :)

      businessinsider.com/nasa-video-solar-tornado-plas…

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      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Mesmerizing… the pictures in the article are breathtaking too. I remember looking at a real time feed of the sun as shot by a specialized telescope in southern France,-which was always pointed at the sun during the day- and learning that it rotates faster around the equator than it does near the poles. Before then, my mental picture of the sun was that of a naively solid object, like a rocky planet.

        Observation biases like you mention are fascinating. Because in astronomy we can never move around to see things from an angle, or remove an obstacle from our field of view, we have to get exceedingly clever. I assume if the sun ejects matter in our direction, and then this matters gets cold, there’s no way to observe it? -isn’t it going to get overblown by the sheer power of the sun surface behind it?

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