Something very strange is going on with the Sun, and while it’s a phenomenon that’s baffling scientists, it also has them very excited.
Space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov shared a video
sequence to Twitter late last week that shows a huge filament of solar plasma
breaking free from the Sun’s surface.
“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,” she tweeted of the
footage, taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
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! pic.twitter.com/1SKhunaXvP
— Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) February 2, 2023
“Implications for understanding the sun’s atmospheric
dynamics above 55° here cannot be overstated!”
According to Space.com, it’s the first time such a vortex
has been observed. While scientists have previously observed filaments break
free from the Sun, it’s the first time they’ve seen it form a polar whirlwind.
Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the
National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told Space.com that
while he’s never witnessed a vortex like this, he does know that something
strange tends to happen at the Sun’s 55 degree latitude once every solar cycle,
or 11 years.
This most recent prominence, explains McIntosh, is like a
“hedgerow in the solar plasma” which appears at exactly the same spot around
the sun’s polar crown every 11 years. Over this period, there’s a fluctuation
in the ejection of solar material, sunspots, solar radiation and solar flares.
“Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55 degree latitude
and it starts to march up to the solar poles,” McIntosh told Space.com. “It’s
very curious. There is a big ‘why’ question around it. Why does it only move
toward the pole one time and then disappears and then comes back, magically,
three or four years later in exactly the same region?”
While there’s confusion around the cause of the phenomenon,
McInstosh said it could be related to the reversal of the sun’s magnetic field
that happens each solar cycle. It’s challenging to observe that area of the
star, as the Sun can only be observed from the ecliptic plane — the plane in
which planets orbit.
More observations of the #SolarPolarVortex reveal it took roughly 8 hours for material to circumnavigate the pole at approximately 60° 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! pic.twitter.com/EpHhwdLeDs
— Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) February 4, 2023
According to NASA, a solar prominence is a large, bright
feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface.
While scientists are still researching how prominences are
formed, they know that the red, glowing material is plasma, a hot gas comprised
of hydrogen and helium. They erupt when their anchoring structure becomes
unstable and bursts outward.