Surabaya – Part of the sun’s surface broke off and started circling the sun’s north pole over the past week, as if it were a giant polar vortex. Scientists don’t know why it happened.
The posting of the strange solar symptoms was uploaded by Space Meteorologist Tamitha Skov on Twitter. He shares the details of the appearance of the strange solar phenomena that he refers to.
“Talk about the Polar Vortex! The northern material has just separated from the main filament and is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star. The implications for understanding the dynamics of the solar atmosphere above 55° here cannot be overstated,” he said. quoted from detikInetWednesday (8/2/2023).
This is the latest discovery in a series of exciting space observations thanks to the capability of the James Webb Space Telescope, known as the solar prominence.
According to NASA, a solar prominence is a large bright feature that extends outwards from the sun’s surface. They are bulges made up of hydrogen and helium, and they usually erupt when the structure becomes unstable and explodes outwards, releasing plasma.
Scott McIntosh, solar physicist and co-director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado said he had never seen a vortex quite like this. But he notes that something strange usually happens at 55 degrees solar latitude every time the sun goes through a cycle.
The solar cycle is an 11 year periodic change in solar activity. During this period, things like solar radiation, solar ejection, sunspots, and solar flares fluctuate.
McIntosh describes the prominence of the sun’s northern region as a ‘hedgerow’ in solar plasma that appears at exactly the same spot around the sun’s polar crown every 11 years.
But although scientists have observed the presence of such ‘hedges’ in solar plasma, the area has never produced the polar vortex that was recently observed.
Scientists think the phenomenon is related to a reversal of the sun’s magnetic field, and believe that the polar regions are important in generating the magnetic field, but they don’t know what causes it for sure.
“Once every solar cycle, it forms at 55 degrees latitude and starts moving toward the sun’s poles,” McIntosh said.
“It’s very strange. There’s a big ‘why’ around it. Why does it only move toward the pole once and then disappear and come back, miraculously, three or four years later in exactly the same region?” he continued.
McIntosh also said that it is a region that cannot be observed directly, because scientists can only observe the sun from the plane of the ecliptic, or planetary orbit.
Currently the ongoing Solar Orbiter mission of the European Space Agency can provide some new insights and knowledge, as it takes pictures of the sun from inside Mercury’s orbit. Still, McIntosh believes we need another mission to fully understand what’s happening on the sun.
This article was published on detikInet with the title “The Sun Shows Strange Symptoms, Never Been Like This Before”.
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