Coronal rain has been seen splashing on the sun

[Wicked Blue]

By Lisa Grossman
July 12, 2023 at 9:00 am

Plasma rain in the sun’s atmosphere makes a splash when it lands. New observations from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter have revealed previously unseen details of how this coronal rain falls, including bright fireball effects and sudden upward surges in plasma.

“These are the highest resolution images we have ever obtained from the solar corona,” says solar physicist Patrick Antolin of Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He presented the results at the National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff, Wales, the week of July 3 and in a paper to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The corona is the sun’s wispy upper atmosphere, the sizzling tangle of plasma and magnetism that is visible during a total eclipse (SN: 6/30/19). When clumps of scorching-hot plasma in the corona suddenly cool, they condense and fall toward the solar surface, just like water droplets in Earth’s atmosphere. This coronal rain has been observed before, but details of its formation and falling were fuzzy (SN: 5/24/18).

The 2020 launch of Solar Orbiter promised to change that (SN: 2/9/20). The probe is making passes over the sun’s unexplored polar regions, carrying high resolution cameras and other instruments to investigate solar mysteries. In late March 2022, Solar Orbiter made its closest approach to the sun to date, swooping within 49 million kilometers of our star — about a third of the distance between the sun and Earth.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronal-rain-sun-space

[GreenWave]

1. Cool! I mean hot actually.

[Javaman]

2. Coronal Rain was the name of my Sun-Ra cover band in college. nt

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. We need a manned mission for better closeups

I volunteer Gym Jordan, Tuberville, Blackburn, and Cruz.

[Wicked Blue]

4. Musk and Bezos too

[Warpy]

5. Naw, they'd enjoy it too much

as just in the instant before the flameout, they saw what no man had ever seen before.

Send the Kochs, the Murdochs, the Mercers, and every other billionaire and his spawn who think they're qualified by money to tell the rest of humanity what to do, say, think, feel, and whether or not to exist.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

7. Make room for the Sinclairs, too

Get all the propagandists on board. It'll be wild!

[Warpy]

8. We've all got a little list

and they'd none of them be missed.

[Warpy]

6. Makes sense

and lighter "rain" probably extends far out beyond the planets, the sun being at the bottom of a pretty deep gravity well. Little thrown out by it achieves the sort of speed needed to escape it. Even photons take eons to escape the core to the surface.