Last year, during the course of a single day, the sun experienced a series of events that led to a 24-hour visual display unlike anything we’ve seen before. Fortunately, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory was trained on the star to capture everything.
A series of events led to a phenomenon called “coronal rain.”
Here’s what happened. On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced three separate events: A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun’s lower right limb, then a coronal mass ejection shot off to the right of the star, followed by a phenomenon called coronal rain, an event where hot plasma in the corona cools, condenses, and then falls back to the surface alongside strong magnetic fields in the region.
To the latter occurrence specifically, it should be noted that the charged plasma doesn’t “happen” to fall alongside the magnetic fields; rather, they’re forced to move along the invisible lines of these fields. As this happens, they show up more brightly, in most instances achieving the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 angstroms with a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin.
Watching the brightly charged plasma gently fall back to the surface of the sun is not only mesmerizing, it’s useful in that it also helps scientists accurately identify the moving magnetic fields on the sun.
The following is footage of the coronal rain from this day. It was captured by NASA’s SDO atmospheric imaging assembly instrument — one frame was collected every 12 seconds, and the movie plays at about 30 frames per second. That means each second in the video corresponds to six minutes of real-time recording.
The video itself covers 12:30 a.m. (EDT) to 10 p.m. (EDT).
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Story and video via nasa.gov
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