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 at solar limb
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Chunming Zhu
This limb observation on an active region provides spectacular animation showing some materials in multiple stands falling toward the Sun, known as coronal rain. This phenomenon involves the catastrophic cooling of plasma along magnetic loops in the hot solar corona. Studies on coronal rain help us understand its relationship to the energy release process in active regions, particularly in solar flares, and the cooling process along the magnetic loop in the solar corona.