A massive chunk of the Sun's surface broke off creating a tornado-like whirl around its North Pole. The new development has baffled scientists after NASA's James Webb telescope caught the instance. While scientists are trying to analyse the phenomenon, the viral clip has perplexed the space community.
The footage of the same was shared on Twitter by Dr Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster, last week. "Talk about Polar Vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star. Implications for understanding the Sun's atmospheric dynamics above 55° here cannot be overstated!" she said.
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In a subsequent tweet, Skov wrote, "More observations of the #SolarPolarVortex reveal it took roughly 8 hours for material to circumnavigate the pole at approximately 60 degree latitude. This means an upper bound in the estimation of horizontal wind speed in this event is 96 kilometers per second or 60 miles a second!"
According to NASA, the prominence is a large bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface. There have been several such instances in the past but this one has stumped the scientific community.
Speaking to Space.com, Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said that while he has never seen a vortex like this, something odd is happening at the sun's 55 degree latitudes with clockwork regularity once every solar cycle, the 11-year period characterized by an ebb and flow in the generation of sunspots and eruptions.
