Solar Tornadoes Listen in RealAudio Email Your Comments

Dave Thurlow, Host

 
Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. Astronomers at England's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are keeping a close eye on tornadoes. But not here on earth. On the SUN.

"In one of the images near the South Pole, we noticed a bright spike of material sticking out above the rim.

Astronomer David Pike:

SOHO discovers super-hot, super-fast solar tornadoes.

"It was very obvious because it was very large and it was also against a dark background being away from the disc of the sun. So, it was easy to spot." After closer observation, Dr. Pike noticed that this spike, made up of super-heated oxygen atoms, was very familiar in shape and makeup to tornadoes on earth:

"In a sense, they are reminiscent of tornadoes on the earth, although I guess we shouldn't take the analogy too far. The real surprise came when we looked at the velocities of the material which were involved in this image. And when we looked at the velocities of the gases that were involved and associated with this spike of material, we found that they were very very high."

High indeed, with speeds of up to 400,000 miles per hour; 2,000 times as powerful as the strongest tornadoes on earth:

"But equally suprisingly the material wasn't only going in one direction. It appears that it was actually rotating around some type of central axis of this spike. And it was that rotation combined with the general look of the thing, rather like a funnel shape that led us to nickname it tornado."

I'll have more about solar tornadoes tomorrow on The Weather Notebook. To see an image of a tornado on the sun, visit our website at mountwashington.org. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.