Earth-Sized Tornadoes Seen on the Sun

May 27, 2008 -- A fiery tornado towering more than 10,000 kilometers has been spotted twirling on the surface of the sun and firing white-hot charged particles into interplanetary space, say solar scientists.

The short-lived plasma twister of April 9, 2008, is leading to new insights about how some high-speed particles -- a particularly dangerous kind of heavy solar radiation for satellites and astronauts -- get catapulted towards Earth.

"What we see is that the twist is a key element," said Etienne Pariat, a solar scientist at George Mason University in Virginia.

The twist acts like a spring to push material out of the sun, he explained at a May 27 press briefing at the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The coiled eruption on the sun was one of three or four that happen every hour, though until now they were very hard to see and make sense of, explained Edward DeLuca, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The trick to the April 9 twister is that it was caught happening while the bright surface flare was just over the sun's horizon, and so out of view. That allowed the less bright parts of what was going on to become visible.

"It's a beautiful view of the process," said DeLuca.