Incredibly beautiful video solar tornado

Tornadoes, tornadoes, cyclones and even a funnel of water around the sink in the bathroom – a fascinating sight. But watching them directly (except for the last case) can be very dangerous for life. Impressive giant eddies are not unique to our planet: for example, on the Sun, they are formed from streams of plasma that is heated to millions of degrees.

Huge masses of ionized gas are directed along the magnetic field lines in the upper layers of our star. Sometimes such currents collide and twist in a fantastic dance, like clouds on the ground. The video captures one of these plasma tornadoes, consisting of particles with a temperature of about 2.8 million degrees Celsius.

The height of plasma tornadoes reaches 60 thousand kilometers, which is almost five times the diameter of the Earth. And the speed of particle fluxes inside the vortex can exceed 300 thousand kilometers per hour, 600 times faster than the most powerful hurricanes on our planet. Such phenomena are observed quite often, their life time is up to 40 hours.

Such records are made up of thousands of frames made by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (Solar Dynamics Observatory or abbreviated SDO). She takes pictures in ten different ranges of the ultraviolet spectrum. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is located in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth. Its main task is to study the solar atmosphere for a better understanding of the interaction between the star and the nearest planets.

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