I’m not sure which is more impressive: a twister the size of a
planet on the sun or a wind gust of 20 million miles per hour
off a black hole in outer space. But NASA has recently
documented both of these phenomena. The cosmic hurricane, so to
speak, illustrated above, arose from the black hole known as IGR
J17091, sucking gas from an adjacent star. “This gas forms a
disk of hot gas around the black hole, and the wind is driven
off this disk,” NASA said. NASA reports its Chandra X-ray
observatory measured the highest wind speed on record from a
disk off this particular black hole. How high? 20 million mph or
three percent of the speed of light. “This is nearly ten times
faster than had ever been seen from a stellar-mass black hole,
and matches some of the fastest winds generated by supermassive
black holes, objects millions or billions of times more
massive,” NASA said. Tornado on the sun The solar twister was
captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Laboratory on February 7-8.
It’s not really a tornado, but twistin