The Sun experiences a form of rain made of cooling plasma
In short: Forget water droplets and clouds. On the Sun, "rain" consists of heavy blobs of intensely hot plasma that condense high above the surface and plunge back down. For years, scientists couldn't explain how this happened so quickly during solar flares—until a new model accounted for shifting chemical elements.
The mechanism driving 'coronal rain' was pinpointed by researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA). This event happens within the Sun's corona, which is its exterior layer. Unlike Earth's rain, solar rain involves cooler, heavier blobs of plasma that form rapidly and fall toward the solar surface. This discovery is significant because it forces a rewrite of long-held assumptions regarding the Sun's atmosphere and how energy circulates through it.
The primary mystery was the speed of the process. Previous models suggested that the heating required to cause coronal rain should take hours or even days. However, observations show that solar flares occur within minutes. The breakthrough, led by graduate student Luke Benavitz and astronomer Jeffrey Reep, came from moving away from the assumption that the distribution of elements in the corona is constant. By allowing for time-varying elemental abundances—specifically elements like iron—the models finally align with actual observations of the Sun.
This shift in perspective matters because scientists cannot directly see the heating process; they must use cooling as a proxy. If models previously treated elemental abundances as constant, they likely overestimated cooling times. This means researchers may need to return to the drawing board to understand coronal heating. Furthermore, these findings provide new tools to simulate energetic flares, which could eventually improve forecasts of space weather events that impact human technology and communications on Earth.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: When and Where it Rains on the Sun | SciShow News
- Also: It actually rains on the Sun. Here’s the stunning reason
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