coronal

Image:This artist’s impression shows a coronal mass ejection, or CME, around a nearby star.

Dahl said that another blast of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection, is forecast to arrive in the United States midday Wednesday.

Earlier models suggested the heating that causes coronal rain should take hours or even days, yet solar flares occur within minutes.

Data from the Ulysses spacecraft showed that the fast solar wind originates mainly from vast coronal holes near the poles.

The heightened chance of a UK sighting has been caused by a fast-moving coronal mass ejection, which is a "release of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun's corona", late on Saturday night.