The Sun's Shooting Stars: A Groundbreaking Astronomical Discovery

 A groundbreaking revelation was recently made by a group of astronomers from Newcastle University, who observed a phenomenon akin to "shooting stars" within the Sun's atmosphere. Utilizing the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter (SolO), the team witnessed these fiery meteor-like occurrences within the Sun's corona. This "coronal rain," though not actual water, is a condensation process where the Sun's incandescent material gathers due to abrupt localized temperature dips. The corona, the Sun's outermost atmospheric layer, contains gases that reach millions of degrees. Swift temperature drops result in the formation of ultra-dense plasma clusters, as wide as 250 kilometers, which plummet toward the Sun's surface at speeds exceeding 100 kilometers per second due to gravitational pull.

The Astonishing Findings

Armed with the first ultra-high-resolution images of these coronal rain clumps, SolO also noted the heating and compression of the gas beneath them. The resulting spike in intensity beneath the clumps suggests that the gas heated up to a million degrees within several minutes.

On our planet, "shooting stars" are the result of meteoroids, space objects ranging from dust grains to small asteroids, entering our atmosphere at high velocities and incinerating. Only a few meteors manage to reach the Earth's surface without disintegrating, and those that do can cause huge craters. However, the Sun's corona is thin and low-density, leading scientists to believe that most "shooting stars" reach the solar surface intact.

Until now, these impacts have never been observed. The SolO observations have unveiled that this process can result in a brief yet intense flare, accompanied by a material upsurge and shock waves that reheat the gas above.

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