Watch: Huge piece of Sun breaks off, scientists stunned: Report

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.

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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!”

Solar physicist Scott McIntosh, the deputy director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, told Space.com that researchers aren’t sure what causes such a unique event.

According to Space.com, this is the first time such a vortex has been spotted, due to the James Webb Space Telescope’s exceptional capabilities. While scientists have seen filaments break out from the Sun before, this is the first time they’ve seen one generate a polar whirlwind.



Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com that while he’s never seen a vortex like this, he does know that something weird happens once every solar cycle, or 11 years, near the Sun’s 55 degree latitude.

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