Originally Posted by Ilya

Rocks and planets do not decrease entropy.

My favorite definition of life is "something that uses energy to increase complexity", i.e. locally decreases entropy. This includes viruses and even computer viruses, but does not include rocks, planets, fire, or even computer hardware.

A stable self-replicating magnetic structure in Sun's corona would match this definition. But we would not recognize it even if we were looking straight at it.