It's raining plasma on the Sun's surface! NASA's IRIS captures the captivating explosion – Watch video

(Image for representational purposes only)

New Delhi: NASA's team of scientists have been working tirelessly toward understanding the enigma that is the sun.

Time and again, the US space agency has released videos and images of the sun spewing solar material and oozing plasma on its surface, which makes one wonder what other secrets the gigantic ball of fire may be holding.

Now, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) has captured a mid-level solar flare: a sudden flash of bright light on the solar limb – the horizon of the sun.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation that release a large amount of magnetic energy with each explosion, which in turn heats the sun’s atmosphere and releases energized particles out into space.

The sun is a constantly changing body and IRIS is helping NASA scientists reach into the depths of why and how it does what it does.

The 9-second video released by NASA, shows what IRIS captured, which is solar material cascading down to the solar surface in great loops, a flare-driven event called post-flare loops or coronal rain.

As per NASA, 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 space agency has further clarified the presence of bright pixels in the video, saying that they 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.

Check out the video below!

(Video courtesy: NASA.gov Video)