Astronomers Have Detected Structures on The Sun That Lead to Weird ‘Plasma Rain’

Coronal rain [image credit: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory]

We’re told “The physics is literally the same” for the Earth’s rain and the Sun’s plasma showers, except that on the Sun the scale is much bigger than the entire Earth.

It’s one of the most enduring mysteries of the Sun: why the superheated surface of this great ball of glowing plasma is actually cooler than its outer atmosphere, called the corona.

Scientists now have a new explanation for this hotly debated topic says ScienceAlert, and the answer was hidden in a strange solar phenomenon that’s never been observed quite like this before: a deluge of plasma rain falling within newly discovered magnetic structures called Raining Null Point Topologies.

On Earth, when it gets hot, water evaporates, turning into steam that lifts into the atmosphere, before cooling effectively reverses the process: water molecules condense inside clouds, which later drop rainfall over the land, oceans, and rivers below.

On the scorching surface of the Sun, a similar cycle of events controls what’s known as coronal rain: superheated plasma that traces up from the Sun, often during solar flare events, along invisible magnetic loops.

When this plasma cools as it travels away from the Sun, it forms a kind of fiery rainfall arc, condensing and then descending back down into the photosphere along the paths of these unseen magnetic tracks.

Basically, both Earth and the Sun are similarly subject to showers, just made from different kinds of condensations and cool-downs.

“The physics is literally the same,” solar physicist Emily Mason from the Catholic University of America told Science News last year, describing her preliminary research.

Mason’s research has now just been published, and it tells us something about coronal rain we never knew: it mostly occurs in an unexpected place, and is associated with a phenomenon new to solar physics.

Continued here [includes plasma rain animation].