It rains on the sun, and thanks to researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA), we finally know why. Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in the sun’s 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 coronas. For decades, scientists struggled to explain how this rain forms so quickly during solar flares.