Comment on đżđđż
Hadriscus@lemm.ee â¨10⊠â¨months⊠agoAstronomy is one of my bigger interests, but I donât 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 ?
ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com â¨10⊠â¨months⊠ago
They arenât uncommon persey, itâs 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 itâs even possible that itâs 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 doesnât 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 wouldnât see the second anchor point).
How they form is an ongoing mystery with many models, like all solar prominences, and it probably isnât 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.
Itâs 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 â10 earth tall tornado of plasma on the sunâ. 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 didnât 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! Iâll have to do some looking :)
businessinsider.com/nasa-video-solar-tornado-plasâŚ
Hadriscus@lemm.ee â¨10⊠â¨months⊠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, thereâs no way to observe it? -isnât it going to get overblown by the sheer power of the sun surface behind it?