NASA Captures Plasma Rain on the Sun’s Surface

On July 24, NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) caught a mid-level solar flare: an abrupt display of bright light on the horizon of the sun as seen at the outset of the event.

Captured on a video released by NASA, solar material can be seen cascading back to the Sun’s surface in great loops, an event known as post-flare loops or coronal rain.

This “rain” is made of plasma, a gas with positively and negatively charged particles separated into a superhot mix that follows paths led by magnetic forces in the sun’s atmosphere.

As the plasma falls, it quickly cools – from millions to tens of thousands of degrees. The corona is much hotter than the sun’s exterior for reasons we don’t quite understand quite yet. Bright pixels that show up at the conclusion of the video aren’t brought on by the solar flare, but happen when high-energy particles saturate IRIS’s charge-coupled device camera – a device used to find photons.

Solar flares are potent explosions of radiation. Flares release a large quantity of magnetic energy, warming the sun’s atmosphere and liberating energized particles into space. Watching flares like this assists the IRIS mission to learn how solar material and energy move all over the Sun’s lower atmosphere, so we can better determine what pushes the constant variations we observe.

In 2014, researchers published a study that revealed an explanation for this intriguing phenomenon. The hot rain that forms on the Sun can be quite similar to how rain develops on Earth. If the conditions in the solar atmosphere are just right, clouds of plasma can cool and condense, falling back to the solar surface as droplets of coronal rain.

The torrential rain storms may play an essential role in managing the cycling of the solar atmosphere and behave as a type of “solar-scale” thermostat in controlling the temperature imbalances of the solar corona.

“Showers of ‘rain’ and waterfalls on the Sun are quite something, though I wouldn’t recommend taking a stroll there anytime soon,” said Eamon Scullion of Trinity College Dublin, an author on the 2014 study. “But the parallels with weather on Earth are both striking and surprising.”

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Image credit: NASA

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