Barrages of the wind's charged particles hit the dayside of Earth, then flow around the planet, stretching our magnetic field into a tail—or magnetotail—extending away from the sun.
A magnetotail is "like a rubber band being stretched and snapped back again. This creates lots of turbulence and forms the tornado," Keiling said.
Stanley Cowley, a solar and planetary physicist at the University of Leicester, U.K., noted that "the connection between aurora and these storms has been known about for 40 years."
What's new, added Cowley, who was not involved in the new study, are the team's detailed figures on the sizes, shapes, speeds, amperage, and frequency of the space tornadoes.
Space Tornadoes: Fast, Furious—And Frequent
The new measurements show that a space tornado forms roughly every three hours and takes just one minute to reach Earth's ionosphere—our outermost atmospheric layer, between 62 and 250 miles (100 and 400 kilometers) above the ground.
Auroras are created when the electrons inside the tornadoes collide with particles in the ionosphere, releasing energy and making the molecules glow.
Unlike their counterparts on Earth, space tornadoes are not directly dangerous to humans.
But "sometimes [space tornadoes] generate large currents in conducting structures"—such as power transformers—"on the ground," Keiling said. And in near space, the storms can disrupt satellite communications, including GPS.
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