 Our star puts on an amazing show this week as we take a look at our earth-facing disc. Back on the second, if you look in the north, there's this prominence that's rising off of the surface and watch it. A piece of it breaks off and whoosh! It becomes like this big vortex. We're calling it a polar vortex and we're seeing material wrapping all the way around the sun and we'll talk more about the scientific implications for that in a minute. But meanwhile, back to the weather, we actually have a coronal hole that's been rotating in through the earth strike zone and along with a big solar storm that launched kind of to the west of earth but kind of grazed us, it's been giving us us a bit of activity. We've bumped to active conditions and have seen some aurora come down just barely into mid-latitudes and hopefully we'll continue to have a little bit more activity over the next couple of days before things completely settle down. So aurora photographers, you get a little bit more time for your shows. But that's not the only story. If you also look over the last day or two, you can watch back up in the northeast, there've been a lot of active regions beginning to kind of emerge like little submarines popping through the surface. You can also see a few down here in the southwest as well, just below that coronal hole that all been emerging. In fact, one of them actually looks like it's growing fast enough that it's becoming a big flare player. That's region 3213. But even that isn't all because we actually have some far-side active regions that are returning into earth view. In fact, as we take a look to the East Limb back on the 7th, Wham! Right there. Do you see that? That is old region 3190 and it's not even in earth view yet, but it launched a big solar storm far off to the east of earth but also gave us a big flare player. It had become a big flare player and it gave us a radio blackout. So amateur radio operators and GPS users, be aware of the noise on the bands and GPS reception is going to tank a little bit. Also with radio comms and space traffic, we could have some issues over this next week and it's going to continue to rise as more of these regions return to earth view. Now returning to that solar polar vortex, back on the 2nd, we saw something that we haven't yet seen with SDO AIA imagery. As we take a look at the sun in the north, you can see a prominence material rising just to the left of the North Pole. And if we zoom in on the northern hemisphere and we label the sun's latitude as well as change the color scale so that the prominence material shows up a bit more clearly, you can see about midday on the 2nd, some of that material begins to break off of the main structure and start getting caught up in what looks to be a polar wind. And as that stuff begins to get swept up in it, you can see it takes about eight hours for that material to completely circumnavigate the pole at about 60 degrees. Now preliminary calculations indicate that the the speed of that wind ends up being about 96 kilometers a second and that's an upper bound. Now that's 60 miles a second, which is insanely fast. Now this discovery has exciting implications when it comes to understanding the internal dynamics of our star because our gas giants, both Jupiter and Saturn, also have similar types of polar winds. So it turns out our sun has more in common with these gas giants than one might think. Now at the sun that magic region that transitions into that polar vortex happens at about 55 degrees latitude and some of the internal dynamics happening in that magic region might actually explain how the sun's magnetic activity cycle is actually generated. So although the sun still holds on to some of its mysteries, today we might have gotten just one step closer. For more details on this week's space weather, including how all this new activity might affect you, come check out my channel or see me at spacewitherwoman.com.