A Piece of the Sun Breaks Off, Creating a Spectacular Solar Polar Vortex
“…the Sun is our astrophysical plasma laboratory…”
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured another remarkable image.
This time, the instrument caught a spectacular view of the Sun, as a piece broke away to swirl into the solar version of a polar vortex.
Scientists were left baffled after material broke off of the sun’s surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its northern pole.
The remarkable phenomenon was caught by NASA on the James Webb Space Telescope and tweeted by Dr. Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster.
“Talk about Polar Vortex!” she wrote last week. “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!”
Unusual activity typically occurs at the sun’s 55-degree latitudes once every 11-year solar cycle, according to experts, but this incident is stumping researchers.
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
Legal Insurrection readers will recall that I noted solar activity was ramping up last year. This event aligns with recent observations.
Our star is ramping up its activity, getting rowdier with sunspot and flare activity. It has flared every day this year so far, and it spat out several X-class and M-class flares in January 2023, the biggest and second-biggest eruptions the Sun is capable of.
This is nothing to be alarmed about. The Sun undergoes activity cycles every 11 or so years, from relatively quiet and peaceful, to absolutely rambunctious.
These cycles coincide with fluctuations in the solar magnetic field. When the magnetic field is at its weakest at the poles, the Sun’s magnetic poles switch places, and the polarity of the magnetic field reverses. This is when the Sun is at its most active, known as solar maximum.
We’re right on the cusp of solar maximum. Because the Sun is so enigmatic and difficult to predict, we don’t know precisely when the polarity reversal will occur (scientists can usually only make a ruling after the event), but we do know a rough ballpark: Our current predictions place it in July 2025.
The piece that broke off is referred to as solar prominence, which is a cool, bright arch of ionized gas that comes from the chromosphere and corona, the outermost layers of the sun’s atmosphere.
Prominences consist of hydrogen and helium and usually erupt when a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma. And experts are convinced that the prominence has something to do with the reversal of the Sun’s magnetic field that happens once every solar cycle that lasts 11 years.
However, there are several firsts attached to this incident because we have never seen the formation of such a vortex before, and the observation of this vortex was only made possible because of the illustrious James Webb Space Telescope.
Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told Space.com that while he’s never witnessed a vortex like this, he does know that something strange tends to happen at the Sun’s 55-degree latitude once every solar cycle.
He likens this most recent prominence to a hedgerow in the solar plasma which appears at the exact same spot around the Sun’s polar crown every 11 years.
What remains a mystery is why it only moves towards the pole once and then disappears and then comes back, magically, three or four years later in exactly the same region, explained McIntosh.
A few weeks ago, I corresponded about the space telescope with Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, a famous American astrophysicist and author of some of the most popular children’s books on science. Here is his brief assessment of the video.
What I’ll say is that the interactions of the Sun’s magnetic field and its plasmas continue to reveal surprising new physics phenomena. When we say that the Sun is our astrophysical plasma laboratory, it’s not an exaggeration. My former students and I theoretically and experimentally replicated phenomena we observed at the solar poles and invented a promising new ion propulsion technology.
This is now something completely new and different. The plasmas here are also moving at incredible speeds but due to very different (and unknown) physics from what my students and I studied.
The mystery remains.
Chalk up another fascinating find made by the James Webb Space Telescope.
Yes, an amazing vortex motion in Sun's north polar region. This animation is made of combined AIA 171 Å + 304 Å images, showing the dynamic cool material in the background corona. https://t.co/OApfBUL9qf pic.twitter.com/ID4TYIw23p
— Halo CME (@halocme) February 3, 2023
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Comments
Can’t be Webb space telescope, which is elaborately prevented from seeing the sun or vice versa.
“The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary science comes from infrared light, which is essentially heat energy. To detect the extremely faint heat signals of astronomical objects that are incredibly far away, the telescope itself has to be very cold and stable. This means we not only have to protect Webb from external sources of light and heat (like the sun and the earth), but we also have to make all the telescope elements themselves very cold so they don’t emit their own heat energy that could swamp the sensitive instruments.”
https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/innovations/coating.html
After how completely corrupt we’ve found out our government is, don’t be surprised if the Webb telescope has pictures of you in your bathroom.
Hey. I have a Roomba for that sort of stuff.
[catastrophic] [anthropogenic] [extraterrestrial] climate cooling… warming… change
We really don’t know much about how the universe works. There are important “laws” of physics beyond our reach as we chase light running away from us into the large universe of endless eternity and into the eternity of smallness. “Truth” is not within our grasp. We are looking for love in all the wrong places.
I’m glad that break off piece is still circling the sun instead of hurtling through space.
True that
I’m sure it’s on a beeline for Montana.
It’s the invasion fleet from the Sun People. They are tired of us shooting down their balloons. LOL
Let the Sun shine
Let the Sun shine in…
It looks so powerful yet so fragile,
We are at its mercy
Video is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory which is in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth.
See “SDO” at bottom of video.
Apparently the Sun has a rotating, very high speed “wind” pattern at its North Pole similar to the one which creates the hexagonal form we saw on Saturn a few years ago.
The material in the ejection just left of top center was caught in this “wind” as it was pulled back into the Sun. It’s hard to see but occurs at the very end of the clip.
Interesting article. The breaking up is very similar to what is going on with Fetterman’s brain.
One is oberseved with a telescope.
The other with a microscope.
The best line I heard about Fetterman was: “If he was relased from the hospital, he was in the wrong kind of hospital”.
The last words of humanity will be some solar scientist saying “That looks interesting.”
relevance ?
Many years ago I asked a professor about global warming. The explanation was the sun could not be the cause of global warming because solar output was a constant. Therefore, any change needed to be attributed to something else, like CO2 emissions.
Research like this challenges that theory that solar output is in fact a constant. Surprised things like this are allowed to circulate. Maybe because the tech sensors have not yet connected the significance of the matter to the reports.
BTW, someone here was among several people telling this this right from the beginning:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/what-can-we-learn-biggest-lies-people-believed-about-covid
My National Enquirer theory proven again. Most of the important evidence on big scandals usually comes out very early. Pay attention before the cover up kicks into gear. We knew much of this right in the beginning. And there big points missing in this report. Like the hospitals collecting $39,000 for each covid death they reported.
As if we needed more fodder for this planet’s charlatans and snake oil salesmen to continue brainwashing the easily-led ignoranuses into believing we can “save the Sun” if we only give up light and heat. The WEF will save us all! No joke, to borrow a term from one of Earth’s top imbeciles.