It Rains on the Sun, and Now We Know How (and Why)

It sounds odd, but it’s true: it rains on the sun.

It rains two million-degree plasma. This solar rain falls in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, when hot plasma cools, condenses, and falls back to the surface. This isn’t a discovery. Scientists have known about it for years. They just never worked out the mechanics of it all.

As detailed in their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii thinks they’ve got it figured.

The researchers say the problem the scientific community had all these years wasn’t with the rain itself; it was the math involved. The Sun’s atmosphere is made of plasma threaded with magnetic fields, and most computer models treat the mix of elements in that plasma like a bunch of static, a big jumbled mishmash