# @nasa on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BIw32JCAnoM
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/11736590-nasa-instagram
- **Posted:** 2016-08-06T10:18:56.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** NASA (@NASA) — https://gondola.cc/NASA

## Caption

Singing in the rain? Not on the sun you wouldn't. Solar material cascades down to the solar surface in great loops, a flare-driven event called post-flare loops or coronal rain. This material is plasma, a gas in which positively and negatively charged particles have separated, forming a superhot mix that follows paths guided by complex magnetic forces in the sun's atmosphere. As the plasma falls down, it rapidly cools – from millions down to a few tens of thousands of kelvins. The corona is much hotter than the sun’s surface; the details of how this happens is a mystery that scientists continue to puzzle out. Bright pixels that appear at the end of the video aren’t caused by the solar flare, but occur when high-energy particles bombard IRIS’s charge-coupled device camera – an instrument used to detect photons.

Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Joy Ng, producer/IRIS/Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory

#nasa #sun #goddard #iris #nasabeyond #heliophysics #space #flare #plasma #gas #science

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
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## Tags

flare, heliophysics, plasma, sun, nasabeyond, science, nasa, gas, space, iris, goddard

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