The Real Sun Shower: How Rain and Waterfalls Form and Pour on our Nearest Star (VIDEO)

We all know that Earth can have a spell of bad weather, but did you know that our sun can have the same? Just like our home planet, the sun can have bad weather that includes high winds and showers of rain. Yet this rain isn't made of water. Instead, it's made out of electrically charged gas, called plasma, that falls at about 200,000 kilometers per hour. Now, scientists have taken a closer look at this bad weather, revealing a bit more about the processes that shape our nearest star.

The plasma rain that falls on the sun comes from the outer solar atmosphere, called the corona, and falls to the sun's surface. The thousands of droplets that make up a "coronal rain" shower are actually each as big as Ireland. Until now, though, researchers haven't been able to catch a detailed look at this particular phenomenon.

Now, scientists have managed the feat. Using the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory and ground-based observatories, the researchers have managed to see regular and massive shifts in the solar "climate." The scientists used images in order to study a giant "waterfall" of solar material pouring down from the outer atmosphere of the sun into a dark sunspot on its surface. They also looked at another set of images that were assembled into a movie and show how a solar flare precedes a "rain shower." More specifically, they've found that the process through which hot rain forms on the sun is surprisingly similar to how rain forms on Earth.

So how does the rain form? If the conditions in the solar atmosphere are just right, clouds of hot, dense plasma naturally cool and condense. The plasma then eventually falls to the solar surface as droplets of coronal rain. In addition, the material that makes up the hot rain clouds reaches the corona through a rapid evaporation process, like water evaporates on Earth. This evaporation is caused by solar flares.

"Showers of 'rain' and waterfalls on the sun are quite something, though I wouldn't recommend taking a stroll there any time soon," said Eamon Scullion, one of the researchers, in a news release. "But the parallels with weather on Earth are both striking and surprising."

The findings reveal a bit more about how "rain" forms on the sun. This, in turn, could tell scientists a bit more about solar weather and, in turn, space weather, which can impact Earth in the form of solar particles.

Want to see solar rain? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.