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Tag: Earths

  • Watch: A massive ‘tornado’ on the sun, the height of 14 Earths, caught on camera – Kashmir News

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    Watch: A massive ‘tornado’ on the sun, the height of 14 Earths, caught on camera

    Images of possibly the tallest tornado in the solar system have been captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. The solar tornado happened in the north pole of the sun and had been building for three days, ultimately rising as high as 120,000 kilometres before collapsing into a cloud of magnetised gas.

    I spent 3 hours yesterday with my solar telescope pointed at a tall tornado-y looking thing on the sun. This 14-Earths-tall swirling column of plasma was raining moon-sized gobs of incandescent material on the sun. I can’t imagine a more hellish place: Andrew McCarthy

    The boiling plasma in the sun’s atmosphere was reportedly brewing for three days last week. It then gained a height of 120,000 kilometres, which is equivalent to 14 piles of Earth. The solar tornado then collapsed and ejected lots of different materials in the form of plasma into space. However, a report on Space Weather said that our planet is not likely to feel any effects of the tornado and the ensuing material.

    The occurrence of Earth-sized blobs falling onto the Sun had astronomers in awe who described it as nothing less than hell. “This 14-Earths-tall swirling column of plasma was raining moon-sized gobs of incandescent material on the sun,” astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy tweeted. “I can’t imagine a more hellish place.”

     

    Reports say that the sun has been immensely active for the last few days. There are at least six sunspots currently visible on its disk, a UK space weather forecaster said. More solar flares and plasma eruptions can be expected in the coming days in one of these spots on the sun’s southeastern edge.

     

    Massive solar winds are also happening right now on the sun, with the winds being ejected from two coronal holes in the sun’s upper atmosphere, that is the corona. These solar winds upon contact with the Earth’s magnetic field are likely to trigger geomagnetic storms.


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    ( With inputs from : kashmirnews.in )

  • Scientists discover new layer at Earth’s inner core

    Scientists discover new layer at Earth’s inner core

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    Sydney: A team of researchers has found evidence of a new layer to the planet sitting within the inner core.

    According to seismologists from The Australian National University (ANU), data gathered from seismic waves caused by earthquakes has shed new light on the deepest parts of the Earth’s inner core.

    The researchers believe they have documented evidence of a distinct layer inside Earth known as the “innermost inner core”, a solid “metallic ball” that sits within the centre of the inner core, by measuring the different speeds at which these waves penetrate and pass through the Earth’s inner core.

    Earlier, it was thought the Earth’s structure comprised four distinct layers — the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core, but the current findings confirm there is a fifth layer.

    “The existence of an internal metallic ball within the inner core, the innermost inner core, was hypothesised about 20 years ago. We now provide another line of evidence to prove the hypothesis,” said Thanh-Son Phaim, from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

    The scientists looked at seismic waves that travel directly through the Earth’s core and ‘spit out’ on the opposite side of the globe from where the earthquake occurred, also known as the antipode.

    The waves then return to the epicentre of the quake.

    The researchers from the ANU compare the process to a ping pong ball bouncing back and forth.

    “By developing a technique to boost the signals recorded by densely populated seismograph networks, we observed, for the first time, seismic waves that bounce back — and forth up to five times along the Earth’s diameter. Previous studies have documented only a single antipodal bounce,” Phaim said.

    “The findings are exciting because they provide a new way to probe the Earth’s inner core and its centre-most region,” he added

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    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )