‘Space tornadoes’ could cause geomagnetic storms, but these phenomena aren’t easy to study

Weather forecast is a powerful tool. For example, during hurricane season, meteorologists create computer modeling for forecasting how these destructive storms form and where they may travel, which helps prevent damage to coastal communities. When you're trying to predict space weather rather than storms on Earth, creating these simulations get a little more complicated. To simulate space weather, you'll need to place the Sun, the planets, and the vast empty space between them in a virtual environment, also known as a “simulation box,” where all the calculations will take place.

Space weather is very different from the storms you see on Earth. These events come from the Sun, which emits emissions of charged particles and magnetic fields from its surface. The most powerful of these events are called interplanetary coronal mass ejectionsor CMEs, which move at speeds approaching 1,800 miles per second (2,897 kilometers per second).

By comparison, a single CME can move a mass of material equivalent to the entire Great Lakes from New York to Los Angeles in just two seconds—almost faster than it takes to say “space weather.”

When these CMEs reach Earth, they will be able to cause geomagnetic stormswhich appear in the sky in the form of beautiful auroras. These storms can also damage key technology infrastructure, for example by disrupting the flow of electricity to power grid and calling transformers overheat and fail.

To better understand how these storms can cause so much damageOur research team created simulations to show how storms interact with the Earth's natural magnetic shield and cause dangerous geomagnetic activity that can knock out power grids.

IN study published October 2025 V Astrophysical JournalWe modeled one of the sources of these geomagnetic storms: small, tornado-like vortices formed by the ejection of the Sun. These vortices are called flow ropes and satellites previously observed small bundles, but our work helped to figure out how they are generated.

Task

Our team began this research in the summer of 2023, when one of us, space weather expertnoticed inconsistencies in space weather observations. This work found geomagnetic storms occurs during periods when there is no solar eruptions it was predicted that it would fall to Earth.

A puzzled space weather expert wanted to know if there could be space weather events that were smaller than coronal mass ejections and not caused directly by solar eruptions. He predicted that such events could occur in the space between the Sun and Earth, rather than in the solar atmosphere.

One example of such small space weather phenomena is a magnetic flux rope—bundles of magnetic fields wrapped around each other like rope. Its discovery in computer modeling Solar eruptions will provide clues as to where these space weather events may form. Unlike satellite observations, in simulations you can turn back time or trace events upward to see where they are happening.

So he asked another author: leading modeling expert. It turns out that finding smaller space weather events is not as easy as simulating a large solar event. eruption and allow the computer model to run long enough for the eruption to reach Earth. Modern computer simulations are not designed to resolve these small events. Instead they are intended for focus on major solar eruptions because they have the greatest impact on infrastructure on Earth.

This shortcoming was quite disappointing. It was like trying to predict a hurricane using a simulation that only shows global weather patterns. Since you can't see a hurricane of this magnitude, you won't see it at all.

These large-scale simulations are known as global simulations. They study how solar eruptions form on the surface of the Sun and travel through space. In these simulations, streams of charged particles and magnetic fields floating in space are treated as fluids, which reduces the computational cost compared to simulating each charged particle independently. This is similar to measuring the overall temperature of water in a bottle instead of tracking each water molecule individually.

Because these simulations represent computational phenomena occurring in such a vast space, they cannot resolve every detail. To affordably solve the vast space between the Sun and the planets, researchers divide the space into large cubes—similar to the two-dimensional pixels in a camera. In the simulation, each of these cubes represents an area 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) wide, high, and across. This distance is equivalent to approximately 1% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

The search begins

Our search began with what was like finding a needle in a haystack. We scoured old global simulations for a tiny, temporary blob—which could represent a rope—in a region of space hundreds of times wider than the Sun itself. Our initial search turned up nothing.

We then turned our attention to modeling Solar eruption in May 2024. This time we specifically looked at an area where a solar eruption encountered a quiet flow of charged particles and magnetic fields. called solar windahead of this.

Here it is: a special system magnetic flux ropes.

However, our excitement was short-lived. We couldn't tell where these tourniquets came from. The simulated harnesses were also too small to survive and eventually failed because they became too small to be resolved by our simulation mesh.

But we needed just such a clue: the presence of ropes in the place where the solar eruption collided with the solar wind.

To address this issue, we decided to address this gap and create a computer model with a finer grid size than those used in previous global simulations. Since increasing the resolution throughout the entire simulation space would be prohibitively expensive, we decided to increase the simulation resolution only along the strand path.

The new simulation can now resolve objects that span distances from six times the Earth's diameter of 8,000 miles (or 128,000 kilometers) to tens of thousands of miles—nearly 100 times better than previous simulations.

Making a discovery

Once we had developed and tested the modeling grid, it was time to simulate the very solar eruption that led to the formation of these ropes in a less detailed model. We wanted to study the formation of these ropes and how they grew, changed shape, and perhaps ended in a narrow wedge spanning the space between the Sun and Earth. The results were stunning.

The high-resolution image showed that the ropes formed when a solar eruption collided with the slower solar wind ahead of it. The new structures had incredible complexity and strength that lasted much longer than we expected. In meteorological terms, it was like watching a hurricane spawn a cluster of tornadoes.

We found that The magnetic fields in these vortices were strong enough to create a significant geomagnetic storm and cause serious problems here on Earth. But most importantly, the modeling confirmed that there really are space weather phenomena that form locally in the space between the Sun and Earth. Our next step is to model how tornado-like characteristics of the solar wind could affect our planet and infrastructure.

Watching these ropes in simulated form move so quickly towards Earth was exciting but alarming. This was exciting because this discovery could help us better plan for future extreme events. space weather events. At the same time, it was alarming, since these tourniquets only looked like a small oversight in modern space weather monitors.

We will need several satellites to directly see these bundles in more detail so that scientists can more reliably predict if, when and in what orientation they can affect our planet and what could be the result. The good news is that scientists and engineers are developing new generation space missions this could solve this problem.

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