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.
C-class solar flare caught under the IRIS slit
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Milan Gosic
Solar flares are manifestations of a sudden release of large amounts of magnetic energy that is being transferred into heating of the solar atmosphere. They are visible on the Sun as short, but strong flashes of light. On 24-Dec-2021 IRIS was fortunate to capture under its slit the onset and eruption of a C-class flare in AR 12907. In continuation of the movie we can also see "coronal rain" generated by the flare, which represents plasma that is ejected and then rapidly cooled from millions down to a few tens of thousands of Kelvins. This plasma is falling back to the solar surface along the magnetic field lines.