Singing in the rain? Not on the sun you wouldn't. Solar material cascades down to the solar surface in great loops, a flare-driven event called post-flare loops or coronal rain. This material is plasma, a gas in which positively and negatively charged particles have separated, forming a superhot mix that follows paths guided by complex magnetic forces in the sun's atmosphere. As the plasma falls down, it rapidly cools – from millions down to a few tens of thousands of kelvins. The corona is much hotter than the sun’s surface; the details of how this happens is a mystery that scientists continue to puzzle out. Bright pixels that appear at the end of the video aren’t caused by the solar flare, but occur when high-energy particles bombard IRIS’s charge-coupled device camera – an instrument used to detect photons.
Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Joy Ng, producer/IRIS/Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory
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