HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Institute for Astronomy have discovered why it rains on the sun.

Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in a region of plasma above the sun’s surface, called a corona.

Solar rain is when cooler, denser blobs of plasma fall down after forming high in the corona.

For decades, scientists have tried to understand how the rain forms so quickly during solar flares.

That mystery was solved by Luke Benavitz, a first-year graduate student at UH, and UH astronomer Jeffrey Reep.

Their discovery was published in “The Astrophysical Journal.”

“At present, (solar) models assume that the distribution of various elements in the corona is constant throughout space and time, which clearly isn’t the

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