It’s five times the size of the Earth! If the size of this solar tornado doesn’t scare the pants off you, the temperature of it should. This solar twister is made from gas ranging from 90,000 to 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Sure, you saying. It’s the sun — it’s supposed to be hot. Clearly we’re going to have to throw out some more numbers to terrify impress you.
This monster stretched 125,000 miles off the sun’s surface, and the winds were around 186,000 per hour for the three hours it lasted. Not that we don’t fully respect the tornadoes here on Earth, but they only reach speeds of around 100 miles per hour.
Solar tornadoes are often precursors to coronal mass ejections. Like a flare up on a giant barbeque, an enormous eruption of charged particles will burst off the sun’s surface. It’s believed that interactions in the sun’s magnetic field lines cause the twisting movements that escalate into tornadoes and in some cases the coronal mass ejections.
via DVICE
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