The Sun has always fascinated astronomers. And now, a new development has baffled scientists. A huge part of the Sun broke off of its surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its North Pole. Though scientists are trying to analyze how this occurred, the video of the development has stunned the space community. The remarkable phenomenon was caught by NASA's James Webb Telescope and shared on Twitter by scientist, a space weather forecaster, last week. The Sun keeps emitting solar flares (called prominence) that sometimes affect communications on Earth, hence scientists are more concerned about the latest development.
" 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 degrees here cannot be overstated! " Scientist said in a tweet last week.
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.
" More observations of the #SolarPolarVortex reveal it took roughly 8 hours for the 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! " Scientist said in a subsequent tweet.
Solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, who has been observing the Sun for decades, told Space.com that he had never seen a "vortex" like the one that occurred when a piece of the prominence broke away and was whipped into the solar atmosphere.
Space scientists are now analyzing the strange event to gather more details about it and present a clearer picture. Though our favorite star is monitored round-the-clock, it keeps throwing surprises, like the multiple powerful flares this month that disrupted communication on Earth.
Sun Facts:
Surface temperature: 5,778 K
Mass: 1.989 × 10^30 kg
Radius: 696,340 km
Distance to Earth: 149.6million km
Age: 4.603billion years
Density: 1.41 g/cm³
Absolute magnitude: 4.83
Our Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system. The Sun is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth, and without its energy, life as we know it could not exist here on our home planet.
The Sun is the largest object in our solar system. The Sun’s volume would need 1.3 million earths to fill it. Its gravity holds the solar system together, keeping everything from the biggest planets to the smallest bits of debris in orbit around it. The hottest part of the Sun is its core, where temperatures top 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). The Sun’s activity, from its powerful eruptions to the steady stream of charged particles it sends out, influences the nature of space throughout the solar system.
NASA and other international space agencies monitor the Sun 24/7 with a fleet of spacecraft, studying everything from its atmosphere to its surface, and even peering inside the Sun using special instruments. Sun-exploring spacecraft include Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, SOHO, ACE, IRIS, WIND, Solar Dynamics Observatory, and STEREO.
You must be logged in to post a comment.