Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Finally, a decent embeddable video of this sun flare with coronal rain.

Via APOD




Does it rain on the Sun? Yes, although what falls is not water but extremely hot plasma. An example occurred in mid-July 2012 after an eruption on the Sun that produced both aCoronal Mass Ejection and a moderate solar flare. What was more unusual, however, was what happened next. Plasma in the nearby solar corona was imaged cooling and falling back, a phenomenon known as coronal rain. Because they are electrically charged, electronsprotons, and ions in the rain were gracefully channeled along existing magnetic loops near the Sun's surface, making the scene appear as a surreal three-dimensional sourceless waterfall. The resulting surprisingly-serene spectacle is shown in ultraviolet light and highlights matter glowing at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. Each second in the above time lapse video takes about 6 minutes in real time, so that the entire coronal rain sequence lasted about 10 hours.


5 comments:

  1. Amazing -- reposted and linked to you. THANKS!

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  2. Phyllis (N/W Jersey)February 27, 2013 at 9:20 PM

    Beautiful - just beautiful! Never saw anything like that before!

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  3. Really cool! Thanks for sharing!

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  4. Wow, just .... wow. Also reposted and linked to you.

    ReplyDelete