Video of sun's surface shows solar rain, eruptions and coronal moss

Ethereal scenes of flowing super-heated material may help explain why atmosphere is hotter than surface

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Fri 3 May 2024 14.12 EDT


Video of sun’s surface shows solar rain, eruptions and coronal moss
Ethereal scenes of flowing super-heated material may help explain why atmosphere is hotter than surface

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Fri 3 May 2024 14.12 EDT

The sun’s otherworldly landscape, including coronal moss, solar rain and 6,000-mile-tall spires of gas, is revealed in footage from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

The observations, beamed back by the European Space Agency probe, reveal feathery, hair-like structures made of plasma and also capture eruptions and showers of relatively cooler material falling to the surface.

Scientists say the observations of the sun’s complex surface dynamics could help resolve the question of why the sun’s atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface – a longstanding paradox in solar physics.

The brightest regions are about 1,000,000C, while cooler material, which dips below 10,000C, appears darker. The footage was recorded on 27 September 2023 by the Extreme-Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, when the spacecraft was roughly a third of the Earth’s distance from the sun.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/03/video-of-suns-surface-captures-solar-rain-eruptions-and-coronal-moss