![]() “We see evidence of being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. “Flying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere – the corona – that we never could before,” said Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. The first passage through the corona – and the promise of more flybys to come – will continue to provide data on phenomena that are impossible to study from afar. ![]() Halving the distance to the Sun since then, Parker Solar Probe has now passed close enough to identify one place where they originate: the solar surface. But how and where they form remained a mystery. In 2019, Parker discovered that magnetic zig-zag structures in the solar wind, called switchbacks, are plentiful close to the Sun. “Not only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun’s evolution and its impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe.”Īs it circles closer to the solar surface, Parker is making new discoveries that other spacecraft were too far away to see, including from within the solar wind – the flow of particles from the Sun that can influence us at Earth. “Parker Solar Probe “touching the Sun” is a monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system. The new milestone marks one major step for Parker Solar Probe and one giant leap for solar science. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere – the corona – and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. The results have been published in Physical Review Letters and accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.įor the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. 14 in a press conference at the 2021 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans. Centuries after its death marked our skies, this supernova remnant continues to perplex.A major milestone and new results from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe were announced on Dec. The researchers will continue to investigate the case of Cas A’s dramatic explosion. “To discover things we never knew – and did not expect – about the high-energy universe.” “This is why we built NuSTAR,” said Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division in Washington. NuSTAR did not see the titanium, essentially the radioactive ash from the explosion, in narrow regions matching the jets, so the jets were not the explosive trigger. ![]() ![]() Though imprints of jets have been seen before around Cas A, it was not known if they were triggering the explosion. The NuSTAR map also casts doubt on other models of supernova explosions, in which the star is rapidly rotating just before it dies and launches narrow streams of gas that drive the stellar blast. Now that we can see the radioactive material, which glows in X-rays no matter what, we are getting a more complete picture of what was going on at the core of the explosion.” “Previously, it was hard to interpret what was going on in Cas A because the material that we could see only glows in X-rays when it’s heated up. “With NuSTAR we have a new forensic tool to investigate the explosion,” said the paper’s lead author, Brian Grefenstette of Caltech. The latest findings strongly suggest the exploding star literally sloshed around, re-energizing the stalled shock wave and allowing the star to finally blast off its outer layers. When researchers simulate supernova blasts with computers, as a massive star dies and collapses, the main shock wave often stalls out and the star fails to shatter. The NuSTAR map of Cas A shows the titanium concentrated in clumps at the remnant’s center and points to a possible solution to the mystery of how the star met its demise.
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