Solar turner! Incredible images showing a 12,000-mile plasma tornado erupting from the sun’s surface
- An astrophotographer has seen a 12,000-mile-high solar bend
- Space meteorologists say it was “big enough to swallow the Earth” if it were closer
- It forms from a mass of plasma that erupts a helical magnetic structure
- The video of the vortex was captured Tuesday in Naperville, Illinois
By Fiona Jackson for Mailonline
Posted: 15:09, 24 June 2022 | Updated: 3:09 PM, June 24, 2022
An incredible 12,000-kilometer-high erupting plasma bend has been captured from the sun’s surface.
The phenomenon is known as a solar tornado and was detected by astrophotographer Apollo Lasky of Naperville, Illinois, USA, on Tuesday.
Solar tornadoes occur due to spiral-shaped magnetic structures that rise from the sun and take root on the solar surface at both ends.
When a plasma column, known as a prominence, fires within this structure, it is guided along the helical magnetic field of the structure, causing the plasma to rotate and form a bend.
According to SpaceWeather.com, Lasky used a solar telescope in the backyard to capture the solar curve.
Experts in space meteorology commented that the vortex was large enough to “swallow the Earth” if our planet were closer to the sun.
They wrote, “This solar storm system did not throw material at Earth,
“Instead, most of the tornado fell back into the sun after a grueling turn.”
Lasky claims in his Astrobin profile that they have invented their own system for building solar telescopes and filters, which have “banned them from astronomy forums”.
However, they state in their biography that “Safety is my number 1 priority and nothing I do is safe.”
The video’s caption states that “twisted and turbulent calcium plasma wires and ribbons can be seen moving at incredible speeds.”
Most of the plasma ejection fell back to the solar surface and the rest of the material was launched into space, according to SpaceWeather.com experts
HOW IS A SOLAR TWISTER FORMED?
Solar bends are formed from “prominences”: masses of overheated charged particles, or plasma, suspended in the solar atmosphere by the sun’s magnetic field.
Similar to Earth, the sun is like a huge magnet bar with a north pole and a south pole producing a magnetic field.
But the sun’s magnetic field is about twice that of Earth and is much larger, extending far beyond the planet farthest from the solar system.
A prominence will form a solar bend when it encounters a spiral-shaped magnetic structure rising from the sun.
If the huge plasma injection is fired inside the structure, it is guided along its helical magnetic field.
For a few months now, the sun has been experiencing increased activity as a result of reaching the most active phase of its 11-year solar cycle, which began in 2019 and is expected to peak in 2025.
The sun’s magnetic poles rotate at the peak of the solar activity cycle, and a solar wind composed of charged particles moves the magnetic field away from the sun’s surface and through the solar system.
This accompanies an increase in solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) from the sun’s surface.
A CME is a significant release of plasma and the accompanying magnetic field from the solar corona, the outermost part of the solar atmosphere, to the solar wind.
Yesterday it was reported that a dark sunspot looking directly at the Earth doubled in size in just a 24-hour period.
Sunspots are dark regions of the sun where it is cooler than other parts of the surface.
Solar flares and CMEs originate near these dark areas of the star.
When they explode in the direction of the Earth, they can cause geomagnetic storms that produce beautiful auroras, in addition to posing a danger to electrical networks and satellites.
The AR3038 sunspot is now said to measure three times the size of the Earth and has an unstable magnetic field that harbors enough energy to cause brief radio outages.
A dark sunspot looking directly at the Earth doubled in size in just a 24-hour period and could possibly send middle-class flames in the near future.
THE SUN: A STAR IN THE CENTER OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
The sun is a G-type main sequence star at the heart of the solar system, whose radiation makes life on Earth possible.
It is sometimes called a yellow dwarf star, but this is not entirely accurate, as its light is closer to white than orange.
The star formed about 4.6 billion years ago after the gravitational collapse of matter in a large molecular cloud.
Most of this matter caused the formation of the star itself, with the rest forming as a disk, orbiting the star and eventually merging into the planets, moons, asteroids and comets that make up the rest. of the solar system.
The sun is 109 times larger than Earth with a mass that is 330,000 times that of our host planet; in fact, it represents 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system, including all objects that orbit it.
The star will reach its red giant phase in about 7 billion years when the hydrogen in the core is no longer enough for the fusion to occur.
In the red giant phase it will expand to swallow the orbits of Mercury and Venus and leave the Earth uninhabitable.
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