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.
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.
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