IRIS Movie of the Day
At least once a week a movie of the Sun taken by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) is posted by one of the scientists operating the instrument.
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4 Apr 2016
Coronal Rain
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Bart De Pontieu
This movie, taken on 6-Mar-2015 at the solar limb, shows "coronal rain": plasma that is rapidly cooled from millions of degrees to only about 30,000 K and subsequently slides back to the solar surface along magnetic field lines. Coronal rain plasma reaches very high speeds (10-100 km/s) on its way down and is used to diagnose conditions and heating mechanisms in the coronal volume. Towards the end of this movie a violent surge occurs which propels relatively cool plasma upwards. The "snow storm" in the middle of the movie is not caused by solar photons but occurs when IRIS moves through the Earth's radiation belts and charged particles hit our detectors.