Astronomers make a stunning discovery of meteor-like streaks falling on the surface of the Sun

Astronomers have made a remarkable discovery of streaks resembling meteors falling onto the surface of the Sun. These solar shooting stars are distinct from the shooting stars we observe on Earth. The shooting stars we see on Earth are actually fragments of space dust or rocks that burn up in our atmosphere.

In contrast, the solar shooting stars are enormous clusters of plasma that rapidly descend to the Sun’s surface. They can be described as a massive rain of fireballs, which play a significant role in heating up the corona, the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere.

These solar shooting stars were observed using the Solar Orbiter spacecraft of the European Space Agency, marking the first time such impacts have been detected. The observations indicate that these impacts generate brief but intense bursts of brightness and lead to the upward movement of stellar material and shock waves, which in turn heat up the gas in the Sun’s corona.

Scientists believe that this discovery could potentially unravel the mystery of why the corona, despite being the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere, is hotter than the layers beneath it. According to solar models, the Sun should become hotter as we move closer to its core, but the corona defies this prediction. Now, it seems that this puzzle may have been solved.

The Solar Orbiter captured these phenomena while observing coronal rain, which consists of plasma firework displays with temperatures exceeding two million degrees Fahrenheit. Instead of water, coronal rain occurs when localized temperature drops cause solar plasma to condense into dense clusters. These clusters then descend as fiery rain onto the cooler surface of the Sun, known as the photosphere, at speeds of up to 220,000 miles per hour.

The Solar Orbiter made these observations from a close distance of only 30 million miles from the Sun, which is closer than the orbit of Mercury. Equipped with high-resolution cameras and sensitive remote-sensing instruments, the spacecraft detected the heating and compression of gas during these coronal rains.

Unlike shooting stars on Earth that develop bright tails due to friction in our atmosphere, these solar shooting stars lack such tails. This is because the powerful magnetic fields in the Sun’s corona strip gas from the descending clusters, preventing the formation of tails. As a result, observing solar meteors has been challenging until now.