The sun dominates the solar system in almost every way imaginable, but much of its inner workings are hidden from humanity. Over the centuries, and especially in the last few decades, technological advances have allowed us to ignore our mothers’ calls and stare at the sun for as long as we want. We learned a lot from all these observations.

New research shows how the Sun experiences its own ‘meteor showers’.

These so-called meteor showers are unlike the meteor showers we enjoy watching on summer evenings. Instead, they are clumps of plasma formed by local cooling. The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter captured their image.

A meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through a cloud of dust particles, usually from a passing comet. When these tiny particles collide with Earth’s atmosphere, friction heats them up and burns them. Some meteor showers produce more than 1,000 meteors per hour.

There are no meteor streams on the Sun. Strong solar wind prevents dust from entering the field. But new research by European scientists shows that something strange is going on with the Sun. Meteoric fireballs of the plasma can fall on its surface.

A research team led by Patrick Antolin, associate professor at Northumbria University, presented their findings at the National Astronomy Meeting at Cardiff University. They will also be published in an upcoming article titled “Extreme Ultraviolet Fine Structure and Coronal Rain-Related Variability Revealed by Solar Orbiter/EUI HRIEUV and SPICE” in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Astrophysicists refer to this unusual phenomenon as “crown rain.” The corona is the outer layer of the Sun. It reaches millions of kilometers in space and is extremely hot. Extreme temperature means the corona is made of plasma. But it is also subject to temperature fluctuations.

To take these images, the Solar Orbiter came within 49 million kilometers of the Sun. This close approach made it possible to obtain the highest resolution image of the solar corona. The orbiter also observed the heating and compression of gas directly under the solar shower clusters. The temperature and pressure rise sharply in the clusters, and the temperature gradually drops again as the clusters fall back towards the Sun.

When they return to the Sun, these clumps do not burn like terrestrial meteor showers. Instead, they become partially ionized and follow the Sun’s strong magnetic field lines as they fall to the surface. When the clots reach the surface, they can produce a brief but intense flash of light. Impacts also cause upward bounces in the material and shock waves that can reheat the material.

“The inner solar corona is so hot that we will never be able to study it in situ with a spacecraft,” said lead author Patrick Antolin. “However, SolO orbits close enough to the Sun to detect minor events occurring in the corona, such as the effects of rain on the corona, allowing us to obtain a valuable indirect investigation of the coronal environment, which is crucial for understanding composition and thermodynamics. Even detecting coronal rain is a big step forward for solar physics because it gives us important clues about fundamental mysteries of the Sun, such as how it warms to millions of degrees.”

Purely as a thought experiment, it’s interesting to consider what would happen if these clumps of plasma hit Earth. A 250-kilometer patch of superheated plasma would be incredibly destructive if it hit Earth. Of course, this cannot be; this is purely speculative. However, this is another reminder of how insignificant and helpless humanity is in the face of nature’s mortality. Source