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.
Coronal rain and twisting plasma
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Joten Okamoto
Plasma suddenly appears in the corona and then falls down to the solar surface. This phenomenon is called coronal rain: low-temperature material generated by cooling hot gas in the corona. Active regions produce numerous kinds of activities such as coronal rain, flares, and ejections. You can see another type of dynamics at the end of this movie, which looks like a twisting motion of plasma that gently erupted from the active region.