CORONAL LOOPS

8.3 light-minutes

A close-up view of the Sun's edge shows vast looping structures made of blisteringly hot, electrically charged gas (plasma) in the Sun's corona. Here the plasma is caught falling back to the Sun following an explosive solar flare in what is known as coronal rain.

Credit: Ultraviolet light by the TRACE team of the Stanford-Lockheed Institute for Space Research and NASA.