A space weather physicist, Dr. Tamitha Skov, recently posted a video on her Twitter handler that showed a huge filament of solar plasma had broken off the Sun’s surface.
Scientists are now trying to analyze the mechanism behind it, but undoubtedly, the video has stunned the space community.
The video shows: “A huge part of the Sun broke off of its surface and is orbiting its north pole like a vortex of powerful winds.”
In her tweet, Tamitha Skov wrote, “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!”
In a subsequent tweet, she 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!”
She even posted a youtube video explaining the special segment on vortex observation.
Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com 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.”
“The ‘hedgerow in the solar plasma‘ appears exactly at the 55-degree latitude around the Sun’s polar crowns every 11 years.”
“Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55-degree latitude, and it starts to march up to the solar poles. It’s very curious. There is a big ‘why’ question around it. Why does it only move toward the pole one time and then disappear and then come back, magically, three or four years later in the same region?”
Space scientists are now analyzing the strange event to gather more details and present a clearer picture.