Astronomers have discovered a phenomena similar to shooting stars on the sun, a new study reveals. Observations from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (SolO) unveiled never-before-seen falling star-type events, or meteor-like fireballs, occurring within the plasma displays known as coronal rain.
The findings will be presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2023) by lead author Patrick Antolin, assistant professor at Northumbria University. While it does not include real water, coronal rain is a condensation process in which some of the sun’s fiery material clumps together due to sudden, localised temperature drops.
The sun’s corona – the outermost part of its atmosphere – is formed of gas at million-degree temperatures. Rapid drops in temperature produce super-dense clumps of plasma up to 250 kilometres wide, and gravity pulls these balls back towards the sun at more than 100 kilometres per second.
