Solar tornadoes provide a grandiose new way to get the job done and may incorporate a bit of both ideas.
(See "'Corkscrew' Waves Seen on Sun-Keys to Solar Mystery?") One posits that countless "nano" solar flares-theoretically invisible with current instruments-are constantly launching spaceward and heating the corona.Īnother theory is that ripples of energy called Alfvén waves travel at 9 million miles (14.5 million kilometers) an hour along the sun's magnetic field lines, shuttling energy into the corona. Other than solar twisters, two ideas stand out. "Something has to transport heat energy there," he added. "You'd expect the sun's temperature to decrease outwards, but that's just not the case," Wedemeyer-Böhm said.
In 1939 solar researchers used an eclipse to sample the corona's light and peg its temperature at 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit (2 million degrees Celsius)-far hotter than the surface temperature of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius). (Related: "Eclipse Expert Makes Hot Finds in Sun's Darkest Hour.")īy Sven Wedemeyer-Böhm Astrophysicist, the University of Oslo The sun's faint upper atmosphere, or corona, is visible from Earth during a total solar eclipse, when the moon blocks out the disk of the sun. "We observed some unusually hot plasma above the sun's surface, so we knew something was happening there, but we didn't know what," said study co-author Sven Wedemeyer-Böhm, an astrophysicist at the University of Oslo.Įxtrapolating from the portion of solar atmosphere they studied, the team calculated that around 11,000 of the twisters exist across the sun at any time.īased on their new computer simulations of the tempests, the researchers also think solar tornadoes may be the keys to a long-standing mystery: Why is the sun's upper atmosphere 300 times hotter than its surface? A Hot Problem The team saw the first signs of solar tornadoes in 2008 but couldn't confirm their existence until now. (Related: "Giant Solar Tornado Caught in NASA Video.") Made of swirling, searing-hot plasma, each twister stretched roughly 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) high and spun about 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) an hour. If Dorothy lived on the sun, she'd need truckloads of ruby slippers.Īccording to a new study, 11,000 magnetic supertornadoes may cover our star at any moment-each possibly as large as the United States.Ī team of solar researchers discovered 14 of the supersize tornadoes using a telescope in space and one on the ground.
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