http://youtu.be/YIHuk-vpdiI NASA recently released this video of a phenomenon called "coronal rain." It is astonishingly beautiful, and the scale of it is simply mind-boggling. If you haven't already seen it elsewhere (it has been making the rounds on Youtube), it's well worth stopping what you're doing and taking a look. Obviously, coronal rain isn't the liquid stuff that we experience here on Earth. Instead of water, it consists of plasma in the sun's corona. Because plasma is electrically conductive, it responds strongly to magnetic fields. And in the case of coronal rain, the plasma cools, condenses and aligns along solar magnetic field lines. This is what produced the incredible filamentary looping structures seen in the video. According to NASA, this event was particularly noteworthy. Here's an excerpt from the agency's description of what happened:
Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, ...
