NASA's Unexpected Discovery: It Rains on the Sun

Scientists have been baffled for years why the sun's outer atmosphere is 300 times hotter than its surface.

"Plasma" rain may be the reason, a new NASA study says.

Rain on the sun is not the same as rain falling to Earth, Emily Mason, a graduate student at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., said in a press release.

On Earth, when water heats, it evaporates and turns into steam that lifts into the atmosphere. When it cools, water molecules condense inside clouds, which eventually turns into rain pulled down to the surface of Earth by gravity.

However, rain on the sun is nothing like what we see on Earth. Instead of water droplets falling from the sky after condensing into clouds, coronal rain drips giant globs of electrified gas from newly discovered magnetic structures called raining null point topologies, according to space magazine room.eu.com.

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On the sun, instead of "60-degree water, you have million-degree plasma, an electrically charged gas that traces magnetic loops that emerge from the sun’s surface," Mason said.

In the end, both Earth and the sun are similarly subject to showers, just made from different kinds of condensations and cool-downs.

"The physics is literally the same," Mason told Science last year.

"Coronal rain starts its journey as an incredibly hot — 1 million degrees Celsius — plasma which flows along magnetic field loops that have emerged from the sun’s surface. When the plasma reaches the peak of the loop, far from the initial heat source, it cools and then condenses. Like the wet H2O variety on our planet, gravity then pulls the plasma back down to fall as blobs of rain," room.eu.com explains.