Tornado like prominences on the sun - do they spin

[WildWill]

Howdy Y’all, 

I started a new topic for this cause Imthink this deserves its own thread… @Calder posted a paper about them spinning and suggesting that they do.

I had read that while they look like tornadoes, they don’t spin, according to “new” research (2018)…. The link Calder provided was from 2014. My gut tells me that they don’t spin… but it’s been wrong before… lol.

Check it out here:

https://www.space.com/40273-huge-solar-tornadoes-dont-actually-spin.html

Here is the paper @Calder posted suggesting that they do…

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/785/1/L2/pdf
 

Anyone care to comment? @Scott McIntosh?
 

All Y’all Have Ya a Good one!

Will

[MissNeona]

3 hours ago, WildWill said:

Howdy Y’all, 

I started a new topic for this cause Imthink this deserves its own thread… @Calder posted a paper about them spinning and suggesting that they do.

I had read that while they look like tornadoes, they don’t spin, according to “new” research (2018)…. The link Calder provided was from 2014. My gut tells me that they don’t spin… but it’s been wrong before… lol.

Check it out here:

https://www.space.com/40273-huge-solar-tornadoes-dont-actually-spin.html

Here is the paper @Calder posted suggesting that they do…

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/785/1/L2/pdf
 

Anyone care to comment? @Scott McIntosh?
 

All Y’all Have Ya a Good one!

Will

Sure looks like they do, sometimes you can see overlaps that wave and seem to curl on lasco. Would make sense that it's energetically plausible

[hamateur 1953]

The real question ladies and gents is do they follow the Coriolis  effect! Example:  In our northern hemisphere tornadoes spin CCW.  In New Zealand they spin CW.   With very rare exceptions.  Of course it’s a wee bit warmer on our sun as it is a ball o plasma. but I would  think physical laws should still apply…..  I am reminded of an old story where two chemistry students were trying to calculate the internal volume of an oddly shaped flask.  The teacher grabbed a one litre  graduated flask, filled it with dihydrogen monoxide ( tap water) Then poured it into the offending flask viola. answer! y’all have a better day than me Hagrid is chompin on my wrist. He wants breakfast! 🤣🤣

Edited February 11, 2023 by hamateur 1953

[hamateur 1953]

Postscript. Don’t bet on me! The only degrees I have are on the celsius temperature scale!! Stick with real science!

 

[hamateur 1953]

After a pm from WW it appears naturally that my first impressions may have been in error.  However it still would be very cool if those tornadoes obeyed terrestrial physical laws… just sayin. 🤣🤣🤣

[marc-pdx]

I read some of the articles at the site Wild Will posted at the top, and only the first part of the very technical whitepaper (PDF) that Calder posted (also in WW's first post). I have more to read when I get a chance, but it looks rather like the type of solar tornadoes referred to as "prominence tornadoes" or "giant plasma tornadoes" probably don't spin (as a typical characteristic, at least). But the other kind of of solar tornado, which are smaller appearing (on the surface) but in numbers up to thousands at a time on the surface, seem to be ones that rotate at very high speeds (eg. ~5 km/sec, which is roughly 11,000 mph - found in the article Calder provided, which is the 2nd link in Wild Will's post, above) and go down to the sun's core. This info appeared in several articles I read that described quite a lot of detail about how these are thought to work. These are seen as small bright areas on the sun's surface, from our vantage point. And the theory being that these may account for why the corona is so much hotter than the actual surface of the sun. The corona is in the three million degree F range, while the surface of the sun is around ten thousand degrees F. These "super tornadoes", according to what I read, have their roots down in the region of the sun's core, which is in the ten million degree F, and "suck" (my term) the heat up and out into the corona, thereby heating it to a higher temp than the suns' surface measures. 

I probably butchered the technical details, but here are two articles I read, of which one was linked off of the first of WW's two links:

https://www.space.com/16325-sun-tornado-solar-twisters.html 

https://www.space.com/16321-sun-tornado-solar-twisters-gallery.html 

I learned a lot more about these solar features than I expected (but not enough to really understand them yet) because I asked about another kind of feature that kept nagging at me yesterday. At some point, I'm going to try to seriously tackle the whitepaper Calder supplied. I'm just not sure how much of it I'm ready to comprehend. 

[hamateur 1953]

Cool stuff Mark.  One thing I recall from my casual readings of quantum physics and particularly how long it takes a photon to actually make it free from the sun totally astounded me!! I wish now I’d delved further into this subject matter, but lacked the incentive at the time, perhaps another day!🤣🤣