{"id":222645,"date":"2025-10-01T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-01T19:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=222645"},"modified":"2025-09-30T13:58:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T23:58:54","slug":"solar-rain-mystery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2025\/10\/01\/solar-rain-mystery\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar rain mystery cracked by UH<\/abbr> researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
\"Sun\"
Researchers worked for years to unlock the mystery of solar rain in solar flares (Image credit: NASA\/Goddard\/SDO)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It rains on the Sun, and thanks to researchers at the University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> Institute for Astronomy<\/a> (IfA<\/abbr>), we finally know why.<\/p>\n

Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in the Sun\u2019s corona, a region of super-hot plasma above its surface. This rain consists of cooler, denser blobs of plasma that fall back down after forming high in the coronae. For decades, scientists struggled to explain how this rain forms so quickly during solar flares.<\/p>\n

\"Sun's
Bright solar eruption captured in space (Image credit: NASA\/Solar Dynamics Observatory)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

New explanation<\/h2>\n

That mystery was cracked by Luke Benavitz, a first-year graduate student at IfA<\/abbr>, and IfA<\/abbr> astronomer Jeffrey Reep. Their work, recently published in the Astrophysical Journal<\/a><\/em>, adds a missing piece to decades of solar models.<\/p>\n

“At present, models assume that the distribution of various elements in the corona is constant throughout space and time, which clearly isn\u2019t the case,” said Benavitz. “It\u2019s exciting to see that when we allow elements like iron to change with time, the models finally match what we actually observe on the Sun. It makes the physics come alive in a way that feels real.”<\/p>\n

Why it matters<\/h2>\n

The new finding means solar scientists can better model how the Sun behaves during flares, insights that could one day help predict space weather that affects our daily lives.<\/p>\n

Earlier models required heating over hours or days to explain coronal rain; however, solar flares can happen in just minutes. The IfA<\/abbr> team\u2019s work shows that shifting elemental abundances can explain how rain can quickly form.<\/p>\n

“This discovery matters because it helps us understand how the Sun really works,” said Reep. “We can\u2019t directly see the heating process, so we use cooling as a proxy. But if our models haven\u2019t treated abundances properly, the cooling time has likely been overestimated. We might need to go back to the drawing board on coronal heating, so there\u2019s a lot of new and exciting work to be done.”<\/p>\n

Fresh insights<\/h2>\n

This research opens the door to a much wider range of questions. Scientists now know that elemental abundances in the Sun\u2019s atmosphere should change over time, which challenges long-standing models that assumed they were fixed. This means the discovery reaches far beyond coronal rain, pushing researchers to rethink how the Sun\u2019s outer layers behave and how energy moves through its atmosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grad student Luke Benavitz and IfA<\/abbr> astronomer Jeffrey Reep published new research about rain forming on the Sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":222654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[34,35,1363,9],"class_list":["post-222645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-astronomy","tag-institute-for-astronomy","tag-manoa-research","tag-uh-manoa","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/manoa-astronomy-solar-rain.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222645"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222873,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222645\/revisions\/222873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}