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Monster Solar Tornadoes Discovered
astroengine writes "For the first time, huge solar tornadoes have been filmed by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) swirling deep inside the solar corona — the sun's superheated atmosphere. But if you're imagining the pedestrian tornadoes that we experience on Earth, think again. These solar monsters, measuring the width of several Earths and swirling at speeds of up to 300,000 kilometers (190,000 miles) per hour, aren't only fascinating structures; they may also trigger violent magnetic eruptions that can have drastic effects on our planet. 'These tornadoes may help to produce favorable conditions for CMEs to occur,' said Xing Li, solar physicist at Aberystwyth University and co-discoverer of the phenomenon."
They were just discovered and the guy is fear mongering the public about the drastic effects.
"speeds of up to 300,000 kilometers (190,000 miles) per hour,"
I thought that everybody would know that 300,000 km is about 186,000 miles (remember c )
Angular velocity is a better way to measure the speed of a spinning object, because it factors out the object's diameter. Sure, 300Mm per hour sounds fast, but for an object that size, it's probably not a very impressive angular velocity.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Are these tornadoes made worse by AGM?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No, you are making the mistake. The conversion in units needs to take into account the precision of the original number to determine where it should be rounded. I doubt the determination of the top speed is within 4,000mph, so the 190K number is better than the 186K number. 200K might even be more fair, but it depends on the original data. Unfortunately, the units conversions are typically done by people who don't understand the concept of significant digits, let alone have any information about how precise the original number really is.
I wish it had said "Solar Monster Tornadoes" - there are so many more visual images possible that way. It's even better when combined with the Pedestrian Tornadoes mentioned in the summary. Wheee!
I also wish it said "Tornados", but that's just because I live in the central part of the country.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Have gnu, will travel.
Storms and weather on the sun should be expected. We are quite familiar with storms on Jupiter, so just scale that up, and you should expect the same on the sun. We just can't observe them as easily.
I would expect that they'll find that there are storms that persist for hundreds of years, if not longer.
Hook a ZPM up to the Promethius' shield generater and put it between us and the prominence!
I am sure there must be some way to tie this into human activity and profit from it?
The top wind speeds reported were around 300,000km/h=186,000mi/h. that's a factor of 3600:1.
Still - it'd be interesting to know if relativistic effects are present.
Might need a new Fujita scale... forget F5, say hello to F4000!
And yes - with conversions comes the question of precision. If they'd said 3x10^6km/hr, it would've meant anywhere from 250,001km/hr - 350,000km/hr. A conversion to read as 2x10^6mi/hr would be fairly sloppy IMHO, but within bounds.
There are differences - magnetism plays a larger role since the Sun is made of plasma and not gas. There aren't too many objects in the solar system which can exert a tremendous gravitic influence on the Sun. Unlike Jupiter (or most planets, for that matter), the Sun's core is cooler than it's surface. The weather may have some different properties, but it's still weather.
Oh, and there's no damned shade anywhere.
FTFY
But if you're imagining the pedestrian tornadoes that we experience on Earth, think again.
My thoughts seeing this title: 'Monster Tornadoes are on the sun, OMFG we're gonna die.' I came down from the knee-jerk ridiculousness of course, but at no point did I think 'Hah, I survived the freak-o F3 that plowed through my area in June, this is nothing!'
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Shouldn't these phenomena be called vortexes? A tornado it a weather phenomenon that occurs under certain conditions on planet Earth.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
I am lawyer representing Monster Cable. Stop using the word "Monster" in this unauthorized way or you will face a lawsuit.
"...the Sun's core is cooler than it's surface."
Wow, no. From Wikipedia, the Sun's center is 15,700,000 K, the surface is 5,778 K, and the corona is 5,000,000 K.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Despite that happy certificate he couldn't do squat to a Windows box without looking it up....
"Storms and weather on the sun should be expected."
Expecting is easy, scientists do that regularly.
What sets them apart from the rest of us is that they find it.
Boy, just not my day. I've gotta stop posting from memory and start double-checking.
So...how long until they make this into a $30,000 budget movie for the syfy, starring Lou Diamond Philips?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Had to do a double-take then. I genuinely thought that said "Monster Solar Tomatoes Discovered" for a second.
Been a while since you last went to the sun, eh?
I'm not contradicting the statement, but how do they know that? What sort of instrumentation did they use to take temperature measurements for the center? AFAIK it's still a reasonable debate as to the properties of our own earth's core, and we live ON IT. Does our distance from the sun (vs. our perspective of the earth) or another difference between the sun and our planet make one's core temperature measurable and the other's not? I'm not trolling. This is not my area of expertise, but I do think it's interesting.
Earth storms are particle accelerators.
What about these?
They can't measure it directly, obviously. The numbers quoted are those given by our best scientific models of the Sun's structure and its nuclear processes. Those models predict fairly accurately the properties and behavior that we *can* observe and measure from Earth and from our space probes, so they give us some reasonable degree of confidence that we're in the right ballpark when estimating a temperature for the core.
Of course those estimates will change as our understanding improves, but that's the same for all science.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Last I checked there was no atmosphere on the sun.
I think Vortex might be a better term.
No, he and Zaphod had a couple of gargleblasters before they stole Hotblack's ship. Stuff will fuck you up real good!
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Stop being rational. Clearly the tornadoes on the sun are a climate change problem, and, let's face it, are George Bush's fault. :)