Shooting stars are normally comet debris or meteors that streak across the sky as they burn up in a planet's atmosphere, but on the sun, they are made of the sun itself.
A team of European astronomers led by the Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK, have spotted a remarkable phenomenon taking place on the sun: ‘shooting stars’.
The sun itself is a star, but like shooting stars here on Earth, these aren’t actual stars, though those on the sun are technically closer in spirit at least. Whereas shooting stars on Earth are produced by space debris entering and then burning up in our atmosphere, shooting stars on the sun are produced by high-temperature solar plasma.
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter caught site of the phenomenon in so-called coronal rain. This is when the millions-degree solar plasma being ejected from the sun hits a relatively cooler spot in the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, and condenses similar to water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere turns into precipitation. These massive clumps of solar plasma are then pulled back into the sun.
“If humans were alien beings capable of living on the Sun’s surface, we would constantly be rewarded with amazing views of shooting stars,” Antolin added.
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