Part of the sun breaks off and forms a whirlwind

There’s a new feature on the surface of the sun – a giant whirlwind made up of a broken solar prominence. A spectacular video shared by NASA shows a large chunk of sun being ejected from the sun, and then crashing back into the north pole (don’t let the name confuse you, it’s still very hot). As it falls it swirls into an enormous vortex, whirling about the north pole. Solar prominences – ejections of hot gas and plasma tethered to the sun via magnetism – aren’t all that uncommon, but a solar prominence breaking off entirely is a once per year sort of event. Seeing that prominence crash back into the sun and form whirlwind 30 times the size of the Earth, now that’s something that has never been seen before.

The big scientific question is ‘why?’ and that’s what’s got NASA stumped. It could be the magnetic field is going a bit wonky because of the end of the Sun’s 11 solar cycle, but that’s about all they’ve got. There’s also the curious case of the prominence itself, which appears every three or four years in the same place for no well explained reason.

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