(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists were amazed after a plasma prominence broke off from the surface of the Sun and formed a tornado-like vortex around its north pole.
This amazing phenomenon was captured by NASA using the James Webb Space Telescope and tweeted by space weather forecaster Dr. Tamita Skov.
“Let’s talk about the polar vortex!” she wrote last week.
“Material from the northern prominence has just broken away from the main stream and is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around our star’s north pole.
The implications for understanding the dynamics of the Sun’s atmosphere above 55° here cannot be overestimated!”
According to experts, unusual activity usually occurs at 55-degree latitudes of the Sun once every 11-year solar cycle, but this case baffles researchers.
A prominence is a large, bright feature that protrudes beyond the solar surface. There have been other thread breaks in the past, but not like this one.
Solar physicist Scott McIntosh, deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said the researchers were not sure why this unique event occurred.
“Once every solar cycle, it forms at a latitude of 55 degrees and starts moving towards the sun’s poles,” McIntosh said. “It’s very curious.
There’s a big question around it, ‘why’. Why does it move to the pole only once, then disappear, and then, as if by magic, come back three or four years later in exactly the same area?”
While experts admit that it likely has something to do with the Sun’s magnetic field, the rest remains a mystery due to humanity’s limited view of its star.
Scientists can only observe the Sun from the “plane of the ecliptic,” or the geometric plane that contains the Earth‘s orbit.
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