Watch: Huge piece of sun breaks off, forming tornado-like whirl; Scientists amused

New York, Feb 10: The moment when a massive chunk of the Sun's surface broke off, forming a tornado-like whirl around its North Pole, in a never-before-seen event has baffled scientists.

The video was shared on Twitter by space weather forecaster Tamitha Skov, who said the clip was taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

"Talk about polar vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament and is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our star," tweeted Dr Skov.

"Over 55° here, the implications for understanding the sun's atmospheric processes cannot be emphasised!," she added.

Reportedly, 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 solar flares and sunspots before, this is the first time they've seen one generate a polar whirlwind.

"More observations of the #SolarPolarVortex reveal it took roughly 8 hours for material to circumnavigate the pole at approximately 60-degree latitude. This means an upper bound in the estimation of horizontal wind speed in this event is 96 kilometers per second or 60 miles a second!" Dr Skov said in another tweet.

"I have never seen a "vortex" like the one that occurred when a piece of the prominence broke away and was whipped into the solar atmosphere," Solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research told Space.com.

The sun is a massive, intensely hot ball of plasma that is constantly undergoing a number of physical processes that cause changes to its surface.

One of these processes is called solar flares. According to NASA, a solar flare is an intense burst of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares are our solar system's largest explosive events. They are seen as bright areas on the sun and they can last from minutes to hours.

Another process that occurs on the sun's surface is called sunspots. Sunspots are areas that appear dark on the surface of the Sun. They appear dark because they are cooler than other parts of the Sun's surface.