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.
Rains on the Sun
Credit: IRIS, LMSAL/NASA, Tingyu Gou
It was raining on the Sun. In this movie, above the solar limb, plenty of materials are falling down toward the solar surface, called coronal rains. They are cooling plasmas that move along the magnetic loops in the hot solar corona. This event occurs near the southwest limb, in the aftermath of activities from a group of active regions, when they rotate to the back side of the Sun.