You know, the solar system is just brim full of awesomeness. Check out the latest skinny on Mercury, once thought to be an unremarkable rock on the grand scheme of things:

Magnetic tornadoes form when the magnetic field in the solar wind links up to the field generated by a planet, a process called magnetic reconnection. Bundles of magnetic field lines connect the surface of the planet directly to the surface of the sun, and as the solar wind pushes them away from the sun, they twist and whirl like cyclones. On Earth, these cyclones (technically called “flux transfer events”) dance on the ionosphere, creating the Northern Lights and messing up GPS systems.

On Mercury, though, the twisters were 10 times as strong as any magnetic cyclones observed on Earth. With so little atmosphere to interfere, Mercury’s magnetic tornadoes are great spinning chutes that ionized gas can slide down.

“They act as magnetic channels or open windows that allow solar wind plasma from the sun, very fast and very hot, to come right down those field lines and impacts the surface,” said Jim Slavin of NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. When the gas hits the surface, it knocks off neutrally-charged atoms and sends them on a loop high into the sky.

Now there’s a hard sf novum just waiting for someone to write it; maybe a system-wide power supply based around funneling the solar wind onto the innermost planet and then harnessing it somehow? Paul McAuley, I’m looking at you. [image courtesy thebadastronomer]

… are rarely as jaw-droppingly amazing as the ones the Cassini probe keeps beaming back from its jaunt through the Saturnian neighbourhood. [via the indispensible Metafilter; image borrowed under fair use terms and not covered under CC license, contact for takedown if required, yadda yadda]

Shots like that make me feel like a kid again; that’s the sensawunda kick, right there. And I needed that today, so I thought I’d share.

I’m sure that we all read a few blogs that our own readers might be surprised we like. I certainly do – usually because they catch my eye while being linked to elsewhere, and I decide to stick with them to see how often they can flick my switches. That’s the beauty of RSS, isn’t it – costs you nothing to suck it and see, and it’s simplicity itself to cancel your subscription.

One such blog I love dearly is BLDGBLOG, whose tag-line is “Architectural Conjecture : Urban Speculation : Landscape Futures”. Yup – it’s basically an architecture blog, but the guy who writes it has an sf fan’s love of sensawunda. Go read this post about supersonic bullets of gas the size of a solar system, and then try to tell me I’m wrong.