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Meteors, also known as “meteor stars,” plunge through Earth’s atmosphere at surface speeds of about 1,800 C. But scientists have found one place where shooting stars get much hotter — literally on the sun.
On Earth, shooting stars occur when meteorites or fragments of space rock enter our planets at high speeds and burn up. But shooting stars seen on the sun are a little different. A team of astronomers has discovered meteor-like fireballs that occur in an amazing phenomenon known as coronal rain, according to the Royal Astronomical Society.
As you may have already imagined, coronal rain does not involve any actual water. It’s a condensation process where some of the hot, burning material from the sun clumps together to create sudden drops in temperature at that location. The gas in the corona, the outer part of the sun’s atmosphere, is usually in temperatures of up to a million degrees.
But during coronal rains, the material produces very dense clumps of plasma that can be up to 250 kilometers across. These clumps then descend back toward the sun, with the star’s immense gravity causing them to travel more than 100 kilometers per second.
Observations from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (SolO) Orbiter helped astronomers make the discovery. In 2022, the orbiter will set off within 49 million kilometers of the sun, about a third of the distance between our planet and the star. This allowed its cameras to perform high-resolution spatial imaging of the corona.
Aside from taking high-resolution images of solar stars, SolO has also observed the heating and compression of the gas beneath them.
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