Watch: Chunk of the sun’s surface breaks off to whirl in a vortex around its north pole
For the first time, scientists have witnessed a filament breaking away from the sun, generating a polar whirlwind.
Absolutely gorgeous polar crown filament eruption off the northern pole of the Sun, just observed by the GOES/SUVI camera ☀️ Needless to say that this ejection is going more or less "straight up" and is not Earth-directed 😉 pic.twitter.com/UslNnKqJuD
— Dr. Erika Palmerio (@erikapal) February 10, 2023
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° here cannot be overstated! pic.twitter.com/1SKhunaXvP
— Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) February 2, 2023
More observations of the #SolarPolarVortex reveal it took roughly 8 hours for material to circumnavigate the pole at approximately 60° 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! pic.twitter.com/EpHhwdLeDs
— Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) February 4, 2023
