Before we looked at the sky to predict the weather. Now we look at the forecast in an app provided by incredibly powerful simulations based on radar and satellite data. Thus, we can see the path of a hurricane days before it makes landfall, potentially saving thousands of lives. But what about the “tornadoes” that come from space?
Sorry? It turns out that interplanetary space is not a quiet vacuum, and a new study warns of a phenomenon that has already been baptized with a disturbing name: “space tornadoes.” They are not wind funnels that carry the debris of the galaxy with them; They are actually rotating vortexes of plasma and magnetic fields that travel at insane speeds through space.
But the most worrying thing is not that they exist, but where are formed. The research reveals that these vortices do not necessarily originate from the Sun, but can be born spontaneously in deep space, as a result of collisions between larger solar storms. And yes, they are powerful enough to wreak havoc on Earth.
A magnetic problem. When astronomers talk about space weather, they’re not talking about a meteor shower. The weather engine of our solar system is the Sun. From time to time, our star spits out gigantic eruptions of charged particles and magnetic fields. The most powerful event of this type is Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs).
CMEs travel at speeds of up to 2,900 kilometers per second. When one hits the Earth, it interacts with our natural magnetic shield (the magnetosphere) and can cause a geomagnetic storm. The good thing is that this interaction produces incredibly beautiful northern and southern lights. The downside is that a severe geomagnetic storm can interfere with power grids, overheat transformers to the point of failure, and damage satellites vital to communications and GPS.
The mystery of ghost storms. This is where the new research begins. In 2023, a team of scientists at the University of Michigan ran into a problem: They were recording geomagnetic storms on Earth that didn’t match any CME that had been predicted to hit us. They were “phantom storms.”
The hypothesis: that smaller, more dangerous space weather events were forming on the way from the Sun to the Earth, rather than directly at the Sun. According to a paper by the researchers in The ConversationThe main suspect was structures known as “flux ropes,” bundles of magnetic fields twisted back on themselves that are affectionately referred to as magnetic tornadoes. They had already been observed, but their exact origin and whether they were powerful enough to cause problems on their own were unknown.
The problem was how to detect them. Current space weather simulations are designed to look at “big” things (CMEs), not little vortices. These flux ropes were too small for the models to resolve. The researchers compare it to “trying to forecast a hurricane with a simulation that only shows you global weather patterns.”
Since they couldn’t increase the resolution of the entire solar system (it would be computationally prohibitive), the team did something smarter: they created an ultra-high-resolution simulation “corridor,” nearly 100 times finer than previous models, centered on the path of a specific solar flare that occurred in May 2024.
And then they saw them. The simulation revealed the birth mechanism of these tornadoes. It happened when the CME “crashed” into the slower solar wind in front of it. The researchers’ own analogy is perfect: it was like “watching a hurricane generate a cluster of tornadoes in its wake.”
The study confirms this phenomenon for the first time through simulation. The collision between the CME and the solar wind creates an intense “current sheet.” In that area, a process called magnetic reconnection (when magnetic field lines violently break and reconfigure) “spits out” these mesoscale vortices.
Why are they dangerous? The simulation demonstrated that these mesoscopic “flow ropes” are not minor phenomena. They contain magnetic fields (about 30 nanoTeslas) “strong enough to trigger a significant geomagnetic storm” on their own.
The real danger is that, to our current systems, they are almost invisible. While a giant CME is an obvious and massive threat that we can track from the Sun, these “space tornadoes” that form along the way would appear, at best, as a “small blip” on monitors. We could be hit by a geomagnetic storm capable of damaging the electrical grid with little prior warning.
Our best weapon. Satellite constellations. This discovery shows that our way of monitoring space weather is insufficient. Instead of single-point satellites (like the DSCOVR observatory, which can only measure what passes in front of it), we need a constellation of satellites flying in formation.
Researchers have proposed a mission designed precisely for this. It would be called SWIFT (Space Weather Investigation Frontier) and it would be a constellation of four satellites flying in a tetrahedron formation, capable of measuring these vortices with precision. Only by measuring the same phenomenon from multiple points at the same time can we understand its real 3D structure and its danger.
Image | NOAA, Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti and Chip Manchester
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