Monday, 13 February 2023 – 12:33 WIB
LIVE Techno – On February 2, a huge tentacle of plasma broke apart in the Sun’s atmosphere before falling, circling the star’s north pole at thousands of miles per minute and then disappearing, leaving scientists baffled.
The entire spectacle, which lasted about 8 hours, went viral on Twitter when Tamitha Skov, a science communicator and research scientist at The Aerospace Corporation in California, posted her footage of the event captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
“Talk about a Polar Vortex! Material from northern primacy has just broken away from the main filament and is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star,” he tweeted.
Essentially, long filaments of plasma – the electrically charged gas that makes up all stars – shoot up from the surface of the Sun, creating large, looping features called prominences.
These structures are becoming very common and can spiral out into space for hundreds of thousands of miles as the Sun’s plasma spins along tangled magnetic field lines, according to the Live Science website, Monday, February 13, 2023.
Surprisingly the bulge suddenly bursts open and then remains airborne for hours, circling around the Sun’s poles. As Skov and other researchers say, the resulting plasma cyclones resemble polar vortices — a type of low-pressure system that forms great halos of cold air over Earth’s poles in winter.
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Scott McIntosh, solar physicist and deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said he had never seen solar plasma behave this way before.
