Coronal Inflow

Coronal Inflow



The active Sun has thrown a lot our way lately, includin storms of particlesstreaming outward in the solar wind an clouds of plasmawhich triggered awesome auroral displays.Still, a growing body of intriguing observationsfrom the LASCO instrument on board th space-basedSOlar and Heliospheric Observatory SOHO)indicates material also flows back toward the Sun, starting fromover 2 million kilometers above it visible surface.Relatively hard to detect against the outflowin solarcorona, a dark inflowing cloud's relative motion is trackedabove in two highly processed images recorded an hour apart.The solar surface, graphically shown by the yellowquarter circle at the lower right,is blocked from view by a smoot occulting disk.Fighting against solarwind outflow of about 120 kilometers persecond the cloud seems to be moving inward at 50-100 kilometers persecond.Occasionall appearing asoften as once per hour,the clouds, seem to be dragged in by collapsin magnetic field loops rather than gravity alone.Researchers are no workingto relate this surprising inflow to thesolar wind and magneti environmentof the Sun.