Planet-Sized Tornado Whirls On Sun's Surface (video)

[xocet]

8. An Interesting Study in Shoddy Reporting...

So, the OP has some video from the "Alien Disclosure Group UK" (which is where I get all my schematics of alien perpetual motion technology, so it has got to be a reliable source for science group OP's (sarcasm)), and NPR has a literal story.

At least, NPR linked to the SDO video - "Plasma Indirection" and not to some derivative video (from Space.com - "Tornado Season on the Sun?") which is incorrectly described in its title and which is altered to make the event longer that the actual original SDO video indicates. This altered video from Space.com is further altered by the "Alien Disclosure Group UK" to remove the Space.com credit at the end of the video and to add its own pathetic (if this judgmental term offends anyone, feel free to open subspace hailing frequencies at your convenience and contact me (sarcasm)) logo to the video - note that ADG (UK) appears in the lower left of the frame for the entire video.

The actual SDO video of the phenomenon is here:

NPR's reporting is here:

VIDEO: A Tornado On The Sun
by Andrew Prince

Here's something you don't see every day: a tornado on the surface of the sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory posted this stunning video, which shows the sun's plasma sliding and spinning around in the star's magnetic fields for 30 hours earlier this month.

Terry Kucera, a solar physicist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Fox News that the tornado might be as large as the Earth itself and have gusts up to 300,000 miles per hour. By comparison, the strongest tornadoes on earth, F5 storms, clock wind speeds at a relatively paltry (though incredibly destructive) 300 mph.

...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/02/17/147071253/video-a-tornado-on-the-sun?ft=1&f=1001&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews

Andrew Prince links his report to Fox News which actually eventually reports that the phenomenon is described by Terry Kucera as a solar prominence, not as a tornado.

Here is Fox News' reporting which is slightly more accurate than NPR's reporting in this case:

Vast solar tornado spied on the sun
Published February 17, 2012 / FoxNews.com

(Fox News uses a five-fold copy of the original SDO video to create a video that is 1 minute and 42 seconds long.)
...

And the giant tornado may be as large as the Earth itself, with gusts of up to 300,000 mph, explained Terry Kucera, deputy SOHO project scientist and a solar physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“It’s about 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- relatively cool,” Kucera told FoxNews.com. After all, the sun’s corona is a whopping 2 million degrees, she explained.

Such tornadoes (Kucera classed it a “solar prominence”) have been known of for decades; the European Space Agency's SOHO spacecraft captured evidence of them as early as 1996, mainly near the Sun's north and south poles at the time. And though they resemble their cousins here on Earth, they’re created entirely differently, Kucera said -- through magnetism, not pressure and temperature fluctuations.

“Those motions you see, it’s all just moving along the magnetic field somehow -- but we’re still looking to understand what’s happening with these things,” Kucera said.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/17/vast-solar-tornado-spied-on-sun/#ixzz1mlgGJ7jj

Here is a description of a solar prominence:

Prominences

Prominences are really just the same thing as filaments only viewed from a different perspective. Filament are seen on the solar disk however filament are very high up in the solar atmosphere, way above the surface. So when a filament is on the edge of the Sun the filament sticks out with space instead of the solar surface behind it. This makes the filament very bright compared to the dark (cold) background of space. We call a filament viewed this way a prominence. They can be simple looped shaped object or very irregular with a complicated structure.

http://www.thesuntoday.org/glossary/objects-on-and-from-the-sun/

So, is plasma motion the same as a "wind gust" and is a solar prominence really a tornado? The answers to those questions are simply no and no. It is too bad that reporters cannot be bothered to make proper distinctions, and it is even worse that NPR has shown itself to be less accurate than Fox News in this case.