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Plasma Rain

12 February 2021
Astronomy

Amazing image at www.spaceweather.com, February 10th, 2021, of a huge cloud of solar plasma suspended above the Sun's surface. It is not stable as blobs and streamers of plasma break away and slide back to the stellar surface. However, the plasma rain drops doin't just all down, the they slide along curving lines of magnetic force. These raindrops are the size of boulders, falling from a cloud of plasma 100,000 km overhead. It was photographed by a guy with a backyard observatory in Naperville in Illinois. The The purple colour of the image is due to a filter designed to limit the glare of the Sun, to protect the observor.

Has life existed beyond earth? See https://phys.org/news/2021-02-life-earth.html …. the NASA mission to Mars in 2021, replete with the new rover contraption, the Perseverence, is designed to look for signs of life, in the here and now as well as in the past. It will also be researching if and when water might have existed on Mars.

Perseverence will take multiple photographs, and videos, collect rock sample and even cut into the rock so that scientists on earth can see what is inside and determine chemical composition etc. Perseverence has microscopes to search for organic molecules, drill and analyse interesting looking pieces of the landscape, and so on. Reams of data will be beamed back to earth, enough to keep some scientists in business for decades.

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