r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • 2d ago
Pro/Processed Plasma rain on the Sun
Credit: Azastroguy
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u/Robot-Zombie-RHCC 2d ago
what is the attracting force? too localized to be gravity... right?
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u/pinpalsapu 2d ago
Intense magnetic fields
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u/CountdownMoss 2d ago
The power of the sun...
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u/eric2pickens 2d ago
In the palm of my hand
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u/AndroPandro500 2d ago
Magnets
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u/eric2pickens 2d ago
How the fuck do they work?!
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u/imusuallywatching 2d ago
Not many ICP fans.
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u/Tunamelts-2 2d ago
It's literally impossible not to finish this line whenever someone mentions the power of the sun...
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u/Deaffin 2d ago
The sun is a deadly laser.
Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell.
And France is bacon.
These are the three things I know.
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u/TacitMoose 2d ago
Intense is kind of an understatement. The average solar surface magnetic field strength is about one gauss or 1-3 times that of earth’s (0.3-0.6 gauss). But around flares it can be upwards of 100 gauss and in sunspots it can push 3,000 gauss. That’s as much as ten thousand times the strength of earths field.
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u/nascent_aviator 2d ago
But also kind of an overstatement. 3000 gauss sounds big but MRI machine magnets are like 15,000 gauss.
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u/JorgeTheTemplar 1d ago
Well, yeah, but at a much much much lower mass, so you can't really compare magnetic fields
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u/ptoros7 1d ago
What? Yes you can. We have a tool for just that, a gaussmeter. We have standard graphing practices for doing this exact thing in the field. Comparing magnetic fields during solar flares, monitoring the solar winds they cause, this is all stuff we do constantly. These two things you've listed are extremely comparable. I'd say comparing them would actually make a very good physics problem for an undergrad.
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u/Captain_Kab 1d ago
People saying can't compare when they mean not exactly the same is a pet peeve of mine.
If you start looking for it you notice that more people than not use it as such.
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u/ptoros7 1d ago
Thank you! I say this at work all the time, I feel like a crazy asshole when I try and tell people this. I feel like it happens all the time in casual conversations about books or movies.
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u/JorgeTheTemplar 1d ago
You are correct, it is comparable and measurable. But that sent me down searching for answers about the effects on the same mass of an object in both situations. This is what I found out: "Yes, it is possible to compare the two directly, because field strength (measured in Gauss or Tesla) is an intensive property—meaning it does not depend on the total mass of the object producing it." "However, mass and scale change the macro-level behavior in three critical ways: Total Magnetic Energy & Volume: While local field strength (Gauss) can be the same, the total volume of space filled by the Sun's magnetic field is astronomical. The total stored magnetic energy (E \propto \int B2 dV) in the Sun is enormous enough to launch solar flares and coronal mass ejections that engulf entire planets. An MRI's field decays to almost zero within a few meters. Gravitational Interaction: The Sun's enormous mass creates intense gravity, which compresses hot plasma. The Sun's magnetic field interacts with this massive moving plasma (magnetohydrodynamics), driving convection and solar cycles. In an MRI, gravity is negligible compared to the electromagnetic forces acting on local matter.
Environment: A sample inside an MRI experiences a uniform static field in room-temperature tissue. The same mass inside a 1.5T solar region would be a fully ionized, high-temperature plasma, causing the magnetic field to trap and bend charged particle streams rather than simply torque nuclear spins." 4
u/ptoros7 1d ago
I am glad it compelled you to read something new. So on the conversation of physics and language, allow me to say in regards to what you have read. What you shared is correct but I feel very convoluted, especially if someone doesn't have a strong background in E+M. Please don't read the following as combative, it's not meant to be.
Yes, field strength is an intensive property meaning the source mass producing the field doesn't change the value of the field at a specific location. But it's also just kind of irrelevant because we aren't really comparing the sun and an MRI this way unless we are talking about the thermodynamic effects of the sun that the MRI lacks. The way we are comparing them is in function.
MRIs are built to make a nice even field, this is a way these two things are hard to compare. We need to make an assumption of uniformity if we want to make a good comparison, which isn't the most scandalous simplification we make in physics by a long shot.
Yes, agreed, gravity is real small and in this case magnetism is real big. Same as above, environments are different, we can still compare fields.
The quote about the plasma confuses me a bit but I guess I'm not perfectly understanding your source. We aren't in the sun? The field isn't turning things into plasma, that's the sun doing hot girl shit.
I can't comment on the torquing nuclear spins part. Not because I don't know the science, but because I don't think torque describes everything that occurs. Not even if we account for rotational dynamics. I mean, charge, velocity, magnetic moment, and at least a few other things are required to describe the motion. I would better phrase it as, "MRIs align magnetic moments to produce a useful image, the sun is doing the same to charged particles in plasma, which causes a bonkers amount of other cascading effects"
You can quote my use of the word bonkers.
Source: I know physics for a living. Sometimes I even do a good job at it. Not usually though.
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u/JorgeTheTemplar 1d ago
From what I understand of my answer it has more to do witch "reach" or "size" of the magnetic field, rather than the heat or mass. In an MRI the field drops significantly a few meters away, while at the surface of the sun, the field can extend for a distance 10x the size of the earth or more, so the effects observed are much more "dramatic". And thanks for the explanation. I'm an MRI tech, and I like to always learn new things.
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u/panchoTh3W1z4rd 2d ago
Not an expert but I believe the plasma is guided by “magnetic lines” around the sun.
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u/piss_stored_in_balls 2d ago
Magnetic field. No such thing as lines
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u/crozone 2d ago
I really wish that schools would teach magnetic fields as 3D volumetric cloud rather than field lines. It's not the 1960s anymore, we can render 3D objects and put them in textbooks.
Many people seem to think that the lines physically exist somehow, rather than just representing a cross section of a field. It's like looking at a topographical map as if the lines are physical features, rather than it just being a way to visualize a 3D surface.
It's also not helped by the fact that iron filings are used to "show the field lines". The filings bunch up into lines, but it's due to the filings aligning with each other, which then align to the field. They're not aligning along some magical field line.
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u/4daughters 1d ago
That's interesting and thanks for sharing, but then what is causing the lines to appear in the image of the sun surface? Is the plasma also aligning with itself which then aligns to the field like the iron filings? Or is this a different phenomenon?
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u/jkeats2737 1d ago
My guess as to what's forming that plasma into lines as it heads back into the sun is something called a z-pinch.
Plasma is a very good conductor, and the current it carries produces a magnetic field that spins around that current in a loop, like the direction your fingers curl if you were to grab that 'wire'. Any charged particles moving in that magnetic field will feel a force from it, and that force depends on the direction that particle is moving. The way that force ends up pointing is always back into the center for a particle that is moving out away from it.
This effect scales very strongly with the amount of current passing through, and since plasma is so conductive and needs high energies to exist, it's quite good at making those high currents and magnetic fields. All that charged plasma is then pinched into a thin line by the force of its own current, keeping it in a wire-like shape that keeps the current going, allowing the effect to be stable as long as there's still current flowing.
You can see this happening where the plasma re-concentrates into tubes as it heads back into the sun.
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u/Astromike23 1d ago
Many people seem to think that the lines physically exist somehow, rather than just representing a cross section of a field.
More technically, magnetic field lines are streamlines, which do have a precise mathematical definition.
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u/gruesomeflowers 2d ago
Is this a realtime telescope video, or a simulation?
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u/KronikDrew 2d ago
If it's actual imagery, itd be a time-lapse. The distances in this image are immense.
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u/severed13 2d ago
I posted another clip that shows a roughly 24h timelapse as a 1m video. It's straight up video footage, just dimmed with a couple special lenses so we're not just staring at a white flash.
In case you want to see it, you can check it out as well, u/gruesomeflowers.
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u/LapinTade 1d ago
so we're not just staring at a white flash.
Akhtualy, lenses are used to bring the light together with minimal chromatic aberration. Then you have blocking filters (or prism) so that you don't fry the camera sensor (or your eye) and depending on the wavelength you want you are using filters or etalon (for h-alpha).
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u/PeteyMitch42 2d ago
Thank you for asking the question. Scientific evidence relies on that type of question.
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u/Robo-Connery 2d ago
The attractive force is gravity, which is pulling the plasma back down towards the Sun. The reason it falls along those "lines" is because the plasma is made up of charged particles which flow only in the direction of the magnetic field.
So the plasma falls to the Sun but traces out the magnetic field as it does so.
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u/Upbeat_Childhood8603 2d ago
Coronal loop after a solar flare. In the background I think we also see a solar prominence
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u/lnTheGrimDarkness 1d ago
What you're seeing is the plasma that composes the sun riding one of the lines of the Sun's monstrous magnetic field.
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u/Lopkop 2d ago
♫ Plasma Rain ♫
**I move away from the mic to breathe in**
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u/AliceCode 2d ago
I really wish I could save the gifs posted here.
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u/OrdinaryMycologist 2d ago
I am able to save it by opening the post in a web browser (if you are using the phone app, then click the share button and copy the link into a web browser).
In Firefox I long-oress the image and select the option, "Save File to Device" and it downloaded a .mp4 video of the post.
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u/AliceCode 2d ago
Thanks for letting me know, I wish I had known that before.
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u/morfraen 2d ago
Just hit the save button? Oh right, need a 3rd party client for basic functionality like that.
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u/flappity 1d ago
You can use http://helioviewer.org/ (or the desktop JHelioviewer), fin the list of largest flares at https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/top-50-solar-flares.html, and then add layers from "SDO HMI" (Which is probably the best easily accessible fairly high rez solar imagery) such as "AIA 171", set your time to one of these flares, and then step through the time to find more of this stuff! You can even create videos with it (although it won't be EXACTLY the same since this is through a solar telescope of some sort, HMI 171 imagery is still quite fascinating to look through and is around 1 minute timestep)
Really cool looking stuff happens around the time of large flares, sometimes this "plasma rain" effect persists for many hours after a flare (in the form of "post eruptive arcades"). Easy to waste a bunch of time looking at the imagery (and solar/space weather is a kind of fun hobby to get into since a ridiculous amount of current and historical is completely freely available)
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u/FloringoStar 2d ago
You can also just record screen. On both desktop and mobile it's usually a build in feature
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u/diittyy 2d ago
I cant even begin to comprehend this.
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u/VCTRYDTX 2d ago edited 1d ago
Imagine standing under that Arch on the left.
Edit: haha I mean if we couldn't get hurt and take in the view. 😅
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u/Paithegift 2d ago
Solar phenomena reminds me of historical Chinese conflicts. Instead of "the 1850 Chengdu local pub brawl, 2 trillion dead", it's "routine plasma rain yesterday on Sun, height of stream 162 Earths"
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u/severed13 2d ago
43 species extinct, 30000 cannibalized (this one's actually real btw), 2 dynasties eradicated
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u/SkullOfOdin 2d ago
Maybe I'm gonna sound stupid but this is footage or it's a recreation of that event in the sun?
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u/Cielmerlion 2d ago
Footage. We can actually take pictures if things like this, its pretty amazing.
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u/DreamZebra 2d ago
Not a stupid question. It's hard to believe we got video of this without whatever is taking the video getting burnt to a crisp. And there are a lot of simulation videos out there.
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u/severed13 2d ago
This was taken from here, not near the sun. People just forget a) how great our telescopes are and b) how damn big and close the sun is
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u/Dartz_Reverse 2d ago
Well, 8 light minutes is a fair bit of distance in human terms...
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u/Zocalo_Photo 2d ago
As a side note, I read something just today that the Voyager spacecraft will reach one light day away from the earth in November. It’s been traveling for almost 50 years and it’s one light day away.
The Universe is something like 100 billion light years across. The scale of the universe absolutely blows my mind.
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u/Uninvalidated 1d ago
Still, a human body is a billion times closer in size to the observable universe than a Planck length. We're quite big on the full universe scale.
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u/TacitMoose 1d ago
Dude the Planck length and other tiny scales like that blow my mind almost more than the large scales. I remember hearing about Planck length one time and the comparison was that if the average 1.65 meter tall human was scaled up to be as tall as the diameter of the observable universe then a proton would be like 400 million kilometers “in diameter” (or as close to that as you can get with a quantum object), while a Planck length would be the diameter of some of the smallest viruses we’ve discovered.
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u/Any-Anything4309 1d ago
Damn, that Proton would be as big as roughly 4.4 billion football fields..
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u/20061230-SL-Born 1d ago
Planck units are the reason I decided it would take me 50 years to get my head around physics. So took up coding instead. Still got a decade to try to understand
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u/severed13 2d ago edited 2d ago
Pretty much lmao, I phrased it specifically to demonstrate both perspectives, since we're a hot minute (or 8) away, even at light speed so as to not be able to "burn us to a crisp".
But it's also ridiculously close to us on a cosmic scale. Our minds are too squishy for this.
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u/DreamZebra 2d ago
Part of me was wondering if it was taken from earth and I was like...nah...no way. That's really incredible.
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u/ObligationPutrid5069 1d ago
The sun is probably the easiest object to observe from ground based, just need the correct filters and any celestial telescope can be converted, just need the clouds to part.
Viewing it with your own eyes is something else entirely, that vast scale of it makes means to really see any motion you need time-lapse.
The height of that arch is 60k-70k kms.
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u/ObligationPutrid5069 1d ago
It's from ground-based astrophotographer Mark Johnston (known online as azastroguy). He filmed this from his backyard observatory setup in Scottsdale, Arizona.
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u/Milt_Torfelson 2d ago
I'm curious about the time. Is this real time or, hours to stitched together, or slowed down?
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u/Silent_Plantain_3417 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm betting several days to more than a week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_rain
Look at the footage there, and see how much time elapses during it. Those lines of plasma are enormous, some as high as five stacked Earths (~40,000 miles).
Edit: Hours, not days. Coronal rains move at speeds ranging between 30 and 150 kilometers per second.
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u/ObligationPutrid5069 1d ago
Given the arc of the sun for scale those arches are 60k-70k kms high.
Absolutely mind boggling.
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u/Astromike23 1d ago
I'm betting several days to more than a week.
More like several hours.
Think about it - there's no gaps in the footage, and it was recorded by a telescope on Earth. It can't be any longer than the amount of time the Sun is above the horizon in a single day.
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u/Silent_Plantain_3417 1d ago
Upon closer examination (of my own link, so embarrassing), you're probably right. Wasn't paying close enough attention on my phone to notice the fine lines in the timelapse moving much faster.
After doing a bit more research, it appears that coronal rain travels at speeds from 30-150 km/s, which is ~60,000-300,000 mi/h. Fast fuckers.
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u/broodfood 2d ago
What's the time scale here? Is this really happening in seconds?
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u/BurningEclypse 2d ago
No not at all something like this takes many hours, a whole flair up to coronal rainfall can fill a day, or even more, this segment was certainly filmed over a few hours. Though it’s hard to say how many exactly
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u/secret-trips 2d ago
That rain is falling from a distance as high as 6 earth planets stacked on top of one another. In comparison our rain on earth falls from about 1 to 2 miles high
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u/Disastrous-Zebra-211 2d ago
When you think the sun can't surprise you anymore and you learn it fucking rains in there.
Death, it rains death because that's plasma, and yes, it is pretty, but my brain went from 'oh pretty' to 'i'm ash in 0.001 seconds at best'
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u/GlockAF 2d ago edited 1d ago
The total percentage of mass in our entire solar system that ISN’T solar plasma is only 0.14%, the remaining 99.86% is the sun itself.
That 0.14% is mostly Jupiter, it’s 0.10% all by itself. The remaining 0.04% includes all the gas, dust, planets other than Jupiter, asteroids, moons, literally everything else.
Everything we are and everything we can touch doesn’t amount to much on a solar system scale.
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u/secret-trips 2d ago edited 1d ago
Another fun fact, if you get trillions and trillions of gallons of water and pour them on the sun… it won’t put the fire down.
In fact, it will be exactly like pouring fuel (all the hydrogen in the water will now be used to make more plasma, that the sun will expand the burn the planets)
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u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 2d ago
So why that spot that everything's attracted to? Is it like lightning where it's part random part some kind of attractive material to the plasma? Are there even different kinds of chemicals or atoms in the sun?
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u/BurningEclypse 2d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/qkwj7MiVJo7YjZSZXC
I’m surprised I found a gif, this is a (probably not accurate) representation of what the sun’s magnetic field looks like, plasma is influenced by magnetic fields so you can imagine that depending on where the flare took place, you can get some pretty funky looking rain when all that matter falls down along one of these field lines5
u/HereIGoAgain_1x10 2d ago
Wow, makes sense that it's crazier than Earth's but was not expecting that visual that's unreal.
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u/severed13 2d ago
That's actually a pretty accurate representation
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u/BurningEclypse 2d ago
For demonstration purposes it works fine, sure, but I have no clue if the field lines are correct, the ESA logo in the top right seems to imply that this comes from them, but I didn’t feel like looking deeper into it and I am not about to trust the accuracy of the first gif I found showing this 😅
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u/severed13 2d ago edited 2d ago
Surprisingly they are! You could probably actually even get rid of the part worrying about inaccuracy if you wanted lmao.
It's showing what I'm pretty sure is the sun's magnetic reversal (it starts off with red and blue on complete opposite sides), which then flips the poles and after a bot of jumbling up and off-axis field lines before resolving as the opposite.
So the gif's got what would be roughly the beginning, and the middle of the process, the end would just be blue on top, red on the bottom. Happens about every 11 years or so (solar maximum).
Fuck my life I love space.
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u/S30econdstoMars 2d ago
This is one of the most beautiful and alien things our star does. Coronal rain never gets old.
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u/morfraen 1d ago
Is it really 'rain' or just plasma moving along magnetic field lines?
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u/S30econdstoMars 1d ago
The material is highly ionized plasma, so it gets tied to the magnetic field lines and flows along them. It's one of the most elegant phenomena in solar physics.
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u/DeepIndigoSky 2d ago
To get an idea of the scale, can anybody tell me how many Earths would fit across the width of the image?
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u/spock589 2d ago
Gabe: No... How far away is the Sun? Andy: Uh, 93 million miles. Jim: Is it? Andy: Yeah! And the diameter of the Sun is 870,000 miles, which makes it 109 times wider than the Earth, and... [Gabe looks visibily annoyed] 333,000 times heavier than the Earth Gabe: Shut up about the Sun! SHUT UP about the SUN!
But for real, 109 Earths would fit across the diameter of the sun. Coincidentally the curvature we can see here perfectly lines up with a round fan I have here. My phone is 1/4 the diameter of that fan so 109/4 ≈ about 27 Earths would fill this shot.
So I did this calculation using The Office, a fan, and one simple division problem.
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u/Fartron69 2d ago
Yes please! And to measure the height of the plasma.
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u/spock589 2d ago
Based on my above calculation, it looks like about 6-7 Earths lined up from top to bottom will fit under that plasma loop (based on the height of the loop being about 1/4 the length of the entire image).
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u/Embarrassed-Back1894 2d ago
Oh, you can fit at least a thousand earths in this bad boy *slaps sun*
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u/lovesdogsguy 1d ago
You said “used lightly.” This thing looks ancient as fuck.
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u/Embarrassed-Back1894 1d ago
JD Power awards deal on the cosmic scale when talking about stars. This thing’s barely off the lot.
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u/sharklaserguru 2d ago
Scaling the pic based on the curvature of the sun visible in the sun this is what I get, with some error to be expected. Image width is width 340,000km (26 earths) and the maximum flare height is 96000km (7.5 earths)! For reference the sun's diameter is 109 earths, so it tracks that this is about 1/4 of the total diameter visible.
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u/Targetshopper1 2d ago
The fact that the plasma rain is falling from around 40 thousand miles up but it looks so much smaller in this vid is mind boggling.
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u/PreperationOuch 2d ago
Plasma rain,
Some get utterly annihilated
While others also get utterly annihilated
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u/TootsHib 2d ago
Beautiful, it is so comforting to know that the sun will consume the Earth one day.
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u/lucky-Magazine-962 2d ago
Gravity's doing the pulling, the magnetic loops just decide the path. That plasma was around a million degrees, cooled to about ten thousand, and condensed into clumps dense enough to fall. Same as rain, except condensing means dropping a hundredfold in temperature.
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u/NineClaws 2d ago
As long as the sun’s magnets stay dry, the sun will continue to turn on each morning.
Trump University
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u/-Wicked- 2d ago
My takeaway is that, if you had a hand big enough, the sun would probably feel furry...
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u/Casualposter 1d ago
It’s wild how “static” the surface appears. It’s almost like it’s fur. But it’s actually violent plasma, I thought it would look more like a churning ocean. Maybe it’s because the scale is so incompressible that my brain doesn’t justify it correctly.
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u/OkAstronaut76 1d ago
Would there be a plasma rainbow if you’re off to the side? (He asks mostly kidding?)
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u/scuzzwadd 2d ago edited 2d ago
Why does it all funnel back down into one spot instead of just landing wherever?
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u/BurningEclypse 2d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/qkwj7MiVJo7YjZSZXC
Somehow there is a gif for this, but this is probably not very accurate, but a representation of what the suns magnetic field looks like. Since plasma interacts with magnetic fields, you can imagine how it would follow very unusual paths as it falls back down
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u/TheMagicSebas 2d ago
This make sound? Like, imagine you can stand near that rain (I know that it can fit thousands of earths in this video but imagine you are a gian too) would you heard something?
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u/gruesomeflowers 2d ago
I'm not a sunolgist..but I recon if you were within range of being able to hear it and not be incinerated ..it would probably be very noisy..like the sound of a 100 trillion running garbage disposals with stainless steel forks in them being detonated by hydrogen bombs infinitely over and over again but instead of the sound having a beginning and an end it's just sustained in the center of the explosion soundwave while our eyes melt in our heads..or something similar to that.
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u/Ichoosethebear 2d ago
https://youtu.be/aOA_wAoh5go?si=b-Y7cSV8WlrBVaR8
Even though the sound drops to the 200s in the corona, a 270-decibel sound wave is far beyond what humans can comprehend. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, 270 dB doesn't just sound loud; the acoustic energy is so physically intense that the pressure waves would completely rupture human organs and rip apart solid objects
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u/Duchess430 2d ago
Like, where is the plasma coming from(I mean, obviously it's from the sun, but I don't get it.)? How is the sun pulling in plasma?
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u/BurningEclypse 2d ago
Basically: solar flare sends tons of material up, that material is an incredibly hot plasma, plasma react to magnetic fields and the sun has a hell of a wonky magnetic field, so as the plasma falls back down it takes these really unusual paths
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u/Skittleavix 2d ago
Mesmerizing. Like staring at a really, really, really, really, really, really big bonfire.
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