Kissing The Sun: Unraveling Mysteries of the Solar Wind

When taking the measurements for this study, the Parker Solar Probe, pictured here in an artist’s impression, traveled at more than 427,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest human-made object in history. Credit: NASA/APL

Using data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe during its closest approach to the sun, a University of Arizona-led research team has measured the dynamics and ever-changing “shell” of hot gas from where the solar wind originates.

Published in Geophysical Research Letters, the findings not only help scientists answer fundamental questions about energy and matter moving through the heliosphere—the volume of space controlled by the sun’s activity—which affects not just Earth and the moon, but all planets in the solar system, reaching far into interstellar space. These effects include significant space weather events.

“One of the things that we care about as a technologically advancing society is how we are impacted by the sun, the star that we live with,” said Kristopher Klein, associate professor in the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who led the research study.

For example, during a coronal mass ejection, the sun flings chunks of its atmosphere—highly energetic, charged particles—out into the solar system, where they interact with Earth’s magnetic field, with varying impacts on satellites, radio communications and even the radiation airplane passengers are exposed to when they fly over the poles, Klein explained.

“If we can better understand the sun’s atmosphere through which these energetic particles are moving, it improves our ability to forecast how these eruptions from the sun will actually propagate through the solar system and eventually hit and possibly impact Earth,” he said.

(Source: phys.org)