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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."
He's afraid they'll make a sequel to Twister. This time with flying space cows.
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".
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.
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.
I am sure there must be some way to tie this into human activity and profit from it?
Might need a new Fujita scale... forget F5, say hello to F4000!
Still - it'd be interesting to know if relativistic effects are present.
They always are, the only question is how measurable they are. A rule of thumb I learned in a physics class is the relativistic effects become important at 10% of the speed of light. Of course, 'important' is a relative term.......
To put it into perspective, a satellite travels at 18,000 km/h (or whatever, you can do the math yourself).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, that's reasonably close. Remember also that they're talking about per hour rather than per second. (You probably did, but I didn't for a second or so...and thought there must be some other mistake.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
"...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)