The Daily Observer London Desk: Reporter- John Furner
The incredible moment a colossal ‘solar tornado’ that is 14 times larger than Earth swirls on the sun’s surface has been captured by NASA in a new video.
The twister, composed of plasma and heat, measured more than 74,500 miles high and moved up to 310,000 miles per hour.
The cosmic show was spotted by astrophotographer Apollo Lasky, who used images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to create the amazing video.
Lasky, from Illinois, said the cyclone had been twisting on the sun’s North Pole for three days, hurling a massive cloud of magnetized gas into space.
The cosmic show was spotted by astrophotographer Apollo Lasky, who used images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to create the amazing video
Solar tornadoes occur due to spiral-shaped magnetic structures that rise from the sun and are rooted to the solar surface at both ends.
When a column of plasma, known as a prominence, shoots up inside this structure, it is guided along its helical magnetic field, causing the plasma to rotate and form a twister.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years of watching the sun,’ Lasky shared. ‘It never stops -amazing.’
The sun has been experiencing bizarre behavior recently – in February, a piece of its northern pole broke off.
A video shows a giant filament of plasma, or electrified gas, shooting out from the sun, separating and then circulating in a ‘massive polar vortex.’
While astronomers are baffled, they speculate the prominence has something to do with the reversal of the sun’s magnetic field that happens once every solar cycle.
The video was shared on Twitter by space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov, who said the clip was taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Lasky, from Illinois, said the cyclone had been twisting on the sun’s North Pole for three days, hurling a massive cloud of magnetized gas into space
The sun has been experiencing bizarre behavior recently – in February, a piece of its northern pole broke off. A video shows a giant filament of plasma, or electrified gas, shooting out from the sun, separating and then circulating in a ‘massive polar vortex’
‘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,’ Skov shared in the tweet.
NASA describes solar filaments as clouds of charged particles that float above the sun, tethered to it by magnetic forces.
These appear as elongated, uneven strands that shoot out from the sun’s surface.
The prominence mentioned by Skov, appears precisely at the 55-degree latitude around the sun’s polar crowns every 11 years.
Solar physicist Scott McIntosh, the deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com: ‘Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55-degree latitude and it starts to march up to the solar poles.
‘It’s very curious. There is a big ‘why’ question around it. Why does it only move toward the pole one time and then disappears and then comes back, magically, three or four years later in exactly the same region?’
While astronomers have previously observed filaments breaking away from the sun, this is the first time one has circulated the region in a whirlwind.
