The 17,500 °F plasma rain that falls on the surface of the sun as part of heating and cooling cycle is caught on camera for the first time

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They say not to stare at the sun - but for a whole five months, physicist Emily Mason spent every day doing nothing but that, by examining images taken of our star's surface.

Ms Mason and her colleagues have found parts of the sun where superheated gases cool to fall back down onto the star's surface as a form of rain.

The findings create a link between two of the sun's biggest mysteries - the nature of the heating which causes the sun's outer atmosphere to be around 300 times hotter than its underlying surface, and the source of the slower and denser parts of the solar wind.

The sun is an enormous ball of plasma - super hot, electrically-charged gases - from which arc magnetic field lines that form giant fiery loops into space.