Solar Tornadoes: Powerful Storms in Our Star

Solar Tornadoes: Powerful Storms in Our Star
This hybrid meeting is also available online via Zoom
Tornadoes on Earth are among the most dramatic and powerful events in nature, formed by columns of rapidly rotating air. What may come as a surprise is that similar swirling structures also exist far beyond our planet, including the Sun's atmosphere. On the Sun, these “solar tornadoes” are not made of air, but of extremely hot, electrically charged gas guided by intense, twisted magnetic fields. This magnetic structure allows them to grow to enormous sizes, reaching thousands of times the size of any tornado on Earth and becoming far more energetic. In this talk, we will explore what solar tornadoes are, how they are observed, and why they matter. We will also discuss how they could influence space weather and, in some cases, affect technologies we rely on in everyday life here on Earth.

Our speaker Dr Suzana Silva Earned a degree in Physics from the University of Brasília in 2009 and completed a Master’s in Physics at the same institution in 2012. She obtained her PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen, Germany. Currently she is a Research Associate within the Plasma Dynamics Group (PDG) in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. She is interested in uncovering essential aspects of the solar atmospheric dynamics by identifying the transport barriers and coherent structures such as vortices in the lower solar atmosphere. The investigations are made by means of realistic MHD simulations complemented by the analysis of data from the active and quiet Sun regions.

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Host or Publisher Mexborough & Swinton Astronomical Society