Solar Tornado

A huge tornado five times the size of Earth erupted on the sun's surface, with superheated gases whirling at more than 100,000 miles per hour. The tornado is up to two MILLION degrees centigrade. Dr. Huw Morgan, co-discover of the solar tornado, adds, ‘This unique and spectacular tornado must play a role in triggering global solar storms.’

‘This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado is filmed by an imager,’ says Dr. Xing Li, of Aberystwyth University.

Superheated gases as hot as 50,000 to 2,000,000 Kelvin were sucked from the root of a dense structure called a prominence, and spiral up into the high atmosphere and travel about 200,000 kilometers for at least three hours. The hot gases in the tornadoes have speeds as high as 300,000 km per hour. Gas speeds of terrestrial tornadoes can reach 150 km per hour.

The tornadoes often occur at the root of huge coronal mass ejections. When heading toward the Earth, these coronal mass ejections can cause significant damage to the Earth’s space environment, satellites, even knock out the electricity grid. The solar tornadoes drag winding magnetic field and electric currents into the high atmosphere. It is possible that the magnetic field and currents play a key role in driving the coronal mass ejections.

SDO was launched in February 2010. The satellite is orbiting the Earth in a circular, geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers. It monitors constantly solar variations so scientists can understand the cause of the change and eventually have a capability to predict the space weather.