NASA officially touches the sun and solves a solar mystery

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For the first time for humanity, a man-made spacecraft has kissed the sun.

“Not only does this achievement provide us with deeper insights into the evolution of our sun and its effects on our solar system, but everything we learn about our star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate director of the Science Mission Directorate, says in a press release.

What’s New – NASA’s daring Parker Solar Probe achieved its first science after three years and five flights to Venus, and entered the Sun’s atmosphere on April 28, 2021. The achievement was announced at a press conference at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Meeting in New Orleans this week. .

So why are we only now learning about this remarkable feat? Well, NASA needed the intervening months to confirm that they actually did – analyzing the energy interactions the probe recorded to try to pinpoint the moment. In the end, the signature of the sun’s magnetic field was the smoky gun that proved we had actually touched the sun.

Since then, the probe has encountered the Sun two more times – once in August and once in November.

What they found–already, this achievement serves up a serious insight into the sun. The first paper detailing the probe’s new findings was published Tuesday in Physical Review Letters, and another paper is due in The Astrophysical Journal soon.

The boundary space between the heliosphere and space is called the critical Alfvian surface. Prior to the mission, the physicists knew this dividing line existed but didn’t know exactly where. Best estimates place it at 4.3 and 8.6 million miles above the surface of the Sun. But the solar probe complicates matters.

In April, the probe entered the sun’s corona (another word for atmosphere) 8.1 million miles above the surface of the sun. By doing so, the probe confirmed that the Sun’s atmosphere is not uniform in shape – it’s not a large sphere encasing the burning orb. Instead, it flows with the peaks and valleys that the probe repeatedly passed. At its closest approach, the probe came within 6.5 million miles of the surface of the Sun.

New discoveries – on its atmospheric path, the probe discovered two strange solar weather phenomena:

A source of solar wind, known as a pseudostreamer A pseudostreamer

Aftershocks are streams of charged particles that escape the sun in a zigzag-like pattern. The Parker flyby demonstrated that the photosphere – or surface – of the Sun generates these solar winds for the first time, although other regions of the Sun can also generate them.

False dreamer is the name given to the huge structures that emerge from the sun. The agency compared it to “the eye of the storm,” because these structures are relatively quiet compared to the surrounding environment.

Psychic dispatchers, as seen by Parker Solar Probe. NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Naval Research Laboratory

What is the Parker Solar Probe?

The Parker Solar Probe is not the first NASA mission to study the Sun. The European Space Agency also has a solar orbiter called the Solar Orbiter (we hope they don’t spend too long on that name), but it hasn’t had a close encounter—so far, it’s only managed to get within 48 million miles, which it wasn’t. Even placed it beyond the orbit of Mercury.

Parker isn’t designed just to get close to the sun – it’s designed to enter its atmosphere to solve the mystery of why the upper reaches of the corona are warmer than the sun’s surface.

To do this, the probe is equipped with a carbon-brick shield capable of withstanding extremely extreme temperatures – up to 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit.

To reach the sun, the probe will take a total of seven flights of Venus, which act like a gravitational slingshot to drop it close to the sun to enter the atmosphere. The January flight will bring the craft back into the corona. The next Venus flyby is scheduled for 2023.

These preliminary results are just the tip of the iceberg (plasmaberg?) for Parker, which will eventually reach 3.83 million miles from the surface of the Sun. Thanks to the new insight gained, the mission team will be able to unlock the mysteries of our star.

ABSTRACT – The high temperatures and strong magnetic fields of the solar corona form streams of the solar wind that extend through the solar system into interstellar space. At 09:33 UTC on April 28, 2021, the Parker Solar Probe entered the sun’s magnetized atmosphere at an altitude of 13 million km above the photosphere, and crossed under the critical Alvin surface for five hours in plasma in tangential contact with the Sun with a Alfvin number of Mach 0.79 and magnetic pressure. It controls the pressure of ions and electrons. The disturbance spectrum has been reported below the critical surface of Alfvén. The magnetic mapping indicates that the region was a steady flux originating on rapidly expanding coronal magnetic field lines located above a pseudotransmitter. The near-millennical nature of the flux may be due to pent-up magnetic reconnection at the base of the pseudo-transmitter, as indicated by the unusually low densities in this region and magnetic mapping.

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