I didn’t know what topic to put this under, “Weather”, “Scuttlebutt” or “Things that @Heiwa Will Claim Doesn’t Exist”?
1 Like
Oops, didn’t think editing the title would bump this post. Didn’t like the old title but didn’t want to make an overly pedantic post, which now I have anyway.
awkward silence…
1 Like
There is an entry in Wikipedia here: Space hurricane
The article says the circulation is counter-clockwise but the illustration seems to show clock-wise.
The upper end of a hurricane is turning clockwise, the air is flowing away from the center.
A false name may lead to false interpretations…
When otherwise serious scientists name a phenomenon in the ionosphere like a well-known dangerous hurricane on the earth’s surface, it is just clickbait and not serious at all.
Hurricane is just one regional name for a tropical cyclonic storm in the earth’s troposphere; other known regional names are typhoon or just cyclone (in the southern Indian and Pacific).
This cyclonic ‘thing’ is neither tropical nor is it related in any way to our weather. Hundreds of kilometers above the earth there is no water driving real hurricanes, just ionized atoms driven by the solar wind and arranged by the magnetosphere and Mister Coriolis’ force.
2 Likes
Both the text and the illustration are with regards to “space hurricanes” so I don’t think it’s confusion between the two.
If the clockwise motion was in fact similar to outflow presumably the article would explicitly say so. Seems more likely it’s something about it I just am missing or don’t understand.
The article says the name “space hurricane” is so named because of a resemblance to a hurricane, not that the two are analogous. Similar to the term “solar wind”.
The pictures & video that I seen looked like counterclockwise rotation from the top view. But they are either drawings or looked like they were digitally enhanced? The 30 second video from phys.org gives the best visual description IMO. I like the name “space hurricane”, easier to remember & say compared to a bunch of other names nerds can come up with.
2 Likes
Wikipedia is saying that plasma is rotating counter-clockwise and in the diagram what is rotating clockwise is labeled “ionospheric flow”.
It also says that that space hurricane is above the ionosphere but its base is in the ionosphere which is made up of “ions and free electrons” which seems to be the definition of plasma. The green lines with arrows must be the base.
