A long, looping filament of plasma snapped over the sun's north pole, creating a 'polar vortex' that scientists can't explain.
On Feb. 2, a massive tentacle of plasma snapped apart in the sun's atmosphere before tumbling down, circling the star's north pole at thousands of miles a minute, and then disappearing — leaving scientists baffled.
"Talk about Polar Vortex!" Skov tweeted."Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament and is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star." See moreWhat does this all mean? Essentially, a long filament of plasma — the electrically charged gas that all stars are made of — shot out of the sun's surface, creating a huge looping feature called a prominence. These structures are common and can loop into space for hundreds of thousands of miles as solar plasma spirals along tangled magnetic field lines.
Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Live Science's sister site Space.com that he has never seen solar plasma behave this way before. However, McIntosh added, long filaments do regularly erupt near the sun's 55-degree latitude lines, where the odd prominence was spotted.
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