Make a wish: Astronomers observe ‘shooting stars’ on the Sun

There seems to be "shooting stars" on the Sun but they behave a little differently from meteors here on Earth.

The "shooting stars" on the Sun work a little different. (ESA/Solar Orbiter EUI/HRI)

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Meteors, also known as “shooting stars,” plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere at such speeds that their surfaces measure around 1,800 degrees Celsius. But scientists have found one place where the shooting stars are heated up to a much higher degree—literally on the Sun.

On Earth, shooting stars happen when meteoroids or bits of space rocks enter our planets at high speeds and burn up. But the shooting stars seen on the Sun are a little different. A team of astronomers found meteor-like fireballs happening within a spectacular phenomenon known as coronal rain, according to the Royal Astronomical Society.

As you might have already imagined, coronal rain does not really involve any actual water. It is a condensation process where some flaming hot material from the Sun clumps together to create sudden temperature drops at that location. The gas in the corona, the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, is usually at temperatures upwards of a million degrees.

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But during coronal rain, the materials produce really dense clumps of plasma that can be as much as 250 kilometres wide. These clumps then plummet back towards the Sun, with the star’s immense gravity causing them to go over 100 kilometres per second.

Observations from the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (SolO) helped astronomers make the discovery. In 2022, the orbiter cruised to within 49 million kilometres of the Sun, which is about one-third of the distance between our planet and the star. This allowed its cameras to conduct high spatial resolution imaging of the corona.

Apart from taking high-res images of the solar shooting stars, SolO also observed the heating and the compression of gas underneath them.

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