Examples of rotating turbulence

Three images, one being a satellite photograph of a typhoon, another showing the vortex produced by a plane engine having travelled through a cloud of red smoke, and the final being a visualization of the dust around a newborn star in space.

By rehabilitating Taylor-Couette flows with Kolmogorov’s small-scale universality, researchers have created a powerful baseline for the study of various phenomena involving rotational turbulence, both in theory and practice, like weather systems, engines, or planets forming around distant stars.

Date:
06 November 2025
Credit:
Typhoon and propeller wake: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain). Accretion disk visualization: P. Marenfeld and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Typhoon and propeller wake: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain). Accretion disk visualization: P. Marenfeld and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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