Fascinating video shows rare solar tornado
Miguel Claro released the video showing the solar tornado of April 20 this year. The Lisbon-based professional photographer, author and science communicator specializes in astronomical “skyscapes” that connect both Earth and the night sky.
The Portuguese is photo ambassador of the European Southern Observatory and member of The World At Night as well as official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve. He recently pulled off a stunning 4K video of how a “solar tornado is released into space,” as Claro captioned it.
Speaking to spaceweather.com, the Portuguese expert said: “I noticed that the solar atmosphere showed a gigantic prominence on April 20, so I prepared my solar telescope to start the photo session.” Prominence is a finely structured concentration of matter in the form of arcs , clouds or similar structures rising above the sun’s chromosphere.
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After about an hour, the expert said he noticed that “this solar prominence was getting bigger and bigger, which means something bigger was probably going to happen.”
Solar tornadoes are “driven by magnetism”
Then the solar tornado started. This particular type of solar flare is “driven by magnetism,” caused by solar magnetic fields that “spin in a frenzied spiral, dragging clouds of plasma with them,” the Portuguese explained to the site.
Due to poor angles on his terrace, the photographer said he only had around 80 minutes to capture as many images as possible to create a time-lapse sequence that could show the evolution of this giant plasma form.
The end result has become a high definition 4K solar film. It includes 290 images taken over the course of approximately two hours.
Nasa’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Lasco instrument aboard Nasa’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the European Space Agency also recorded animation on the same day, the report said.
SOHO’s instrument is also said to have captured a possible coronal mass ejection, a stream of charged particles from the Sun. Sometimes these so-called CMEs can collide with the Earth’s magnetic field and cause colorful auroras.
