We know what we are going to tell you might seem impossible, but it also rains in the Sun! We are not talking about a normal water rain, instead it’s fiery plasma (such a hot material that there’s nothing like it on Earth. For years, scientists observed how masses of matter fell from the atmosphere of the Sun, but they didn’t understand why this happened. Now, a group of researchers from the University of Hawaii has found the answer: chemical changes inside the Sun itself.
This discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal by researchers Luke Fushimi Benavitz, Jeffrey Reep, Lucas Tarr, and Andy To, changes everything about the way in which we understand our star. So, let’s find out more details about this incredible finding.
The Sun
The Sun is not a steady and perfect sphere, it’s an ocean of fire and energy with many extreme phenomena. Among them we can find one of the most curious and beautiful phenomena: solar rain, also known as ‘’coronal rain’’.
When the Sun releases a flare or an eruption, the fiery plasma rises along magnetic arches that stretch high above the surface. At great heights, some of that material begins to cool down, become denser, and fall back toward the Sun at tremendous speeds. To telescopes, it looks like glowing rivers of fire streaming along invisible magnetic paths.
For a long time, astronomers tried to simulate this phenomenn with computers, but they couldn’t make it. In theory, the plasma should keep high or colder temperatures in a uniform way. However, the observations showed that dense ”drooplets” were never formed seen in real solar rain.
The secret was the elements
The definite clue was when the researchers thought that the problem could be what the plasma was made of and not the temperature. Until then, models of the Sun assumed that its chemical composition was uniform and fixed, but this is not true… Actually, the amount of elements like iron, magnesium, or silicon change with the passage of time and depending on the Sun’s zone.
To prove it, the team used a program called HYDRAD, a simulator that allows studying how plasma inside the Sun’s magnetic loops behaves. When they included those chemical variations to the simulations, something surprising happened: the solar rain appeared naturally, without extra forces or tricks required.
They discovered that when the concentration of certain elements increases, the plasma loses energy and cools much faster. That sudden cooling creates condensations, dense blobs that become too heavy to stay suspended. Pulled by gravity, they plunge back toward the Sun’s surface along magnetic field lines.
A Sun that changes on the inside
This discovery breaks an old idea: the Sun is chemically stable. Actually, its composition constantly changes because the flows of material that go up and down between the chromosphere and the corona alter the proportion of the elements, which directly affects how the solar atmosphere heats and how it cools.
In one of the most revealing simulations, scientists saw how the plasma that rises from the lower layers of the Sun dragging denser material with it. This created areas where the chemical mix changed, causing energy to radiate away much faster. Within minutes, those regions cooled sharply, the plasma condensed, and a “drop” of fire fell back down to the surface.
Changing the way to study space weather
Understanding solar rain is more than a scientific curiosity; it helps understanding space weather. This is how solar bursts affect Earth, satellites, communications, and electric networks.
By learning exactly how and when solar rain forms, researchers can improve models of solar eruptions and anticipate their effects on our planet. The new findings also suggest that these same processes could occur on other stars, helping explain similar “stellar rain” observed elsewhere in the universe.
Isn’t it amazing the amount of new information we get when we thought we knew a lot of things about space?