Guwahati: Talk about events that may have an impact across the universe. In a mind-boggling occurrence which has stunned researchers, a big piece of the Sun has broken off and resulted in a solar flare resembling a tornado located around its northern polar region.
Scientists are yet to find the cause for this shocking development. A video of this solar flare has taken the space community by storm. According to media reports, the video was recorded last week by NASA’s James Webb telescope and shared on Twitter by Dr Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster.
“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.
Additionally, Dr Skov also said, “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!”
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While the space community is stunned, solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, who has been observing the Sun for decades, explained that a piece he had never before witnessed a “vortex” like this one when a huge chunk of the Sun separated and was sucked into the atmosphere.
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Because the telescope and instruments have to be kept cold, Webb’s protective sunshield will be blocking the inner solar system from view. This means that the Sun, Earth, Moon, Mercury, and Venus, and of course sun-grazing comets and many known near-Earth objects cannot be observed…
Love the article, must have been written by a primary school student getting ready to work for CNN.
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