Scientists stunned as huge piece of Sun breaks off
PTC News desk, February 10: In an unbelievable moment a huge piece of sun broke off its surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its North Pole. This incident was caught by NASA, such incident have baffled scientists and have never happened ever.
A video shows that a giant piece filament of plasma which was shooting out from the sun, separating and then circulating in a 'massive polar vortex.' Sun has always fascinated scientists and astronomers, but this was quite out of the blue. Few speculate the prominence has something to do with the reversal of the sun's magnetic field that happens once every solar cycle.
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The Sun keeps emitting solar flares which is 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!" Dr Skov said in a tweet last week.
As per the information received from NASA, it is a large bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface. In the past there were several instances, but this incident has kept everyone stumped in the scientific community.
"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!" Dr Skov said in a subsequent tweet.
The Solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, has been observing the Sun very keenly 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.
To gather more information and details Astronomers and scientists are now analyzing the strange incident that took place recently.
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- With inputs from agencies
