The Sun apparently got a little goofy as scientists observed a small, strange chunk of it breaking off and doing a little jig.
According to Scott McIntosh, the deputy director of Boulder, Colorado's National Center for Atmospheric Research, this fascinating filament is seemingly the first of its kind and may have to do with another bizarre observation: a "hedgerow in the solar plasma," as the solar physicist told, that occurs at exactly 55 degrees latitude at the Sun's poles once per the star's 11-year sunspot cycle.
"Once every solar cycle, it forms at the 55 degree latitude and it starts to march up to the solar poles," McIntosh told the space website. "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 scientists have seen filaments break off of the Sun before, they've never seen one turn back in on itself and form a strange whirlwind quite like this one.Just a few days after this funny little filament was spotted, two back-to-back solar flares that were powerful enough to knock out short-wave radios on Earth were also spotted on the Sun — but those were
less noteworthy, if only because we're in the active period of the Sun's 11-year cycle, when these sorts of flares and fanfares occur with more regularity. This filament eruption from today gives us a fascinating view of the filament's cool, dense plasma being lifted through the hot, tenuous corona as it is trapped within an insulating magnetic flux rope. Shown here is a combination of 171 and 304 Å imagery from SDO/AIA. 1/2
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