Our closest-ever look inside the sun’s corona has unveiled an unexpectedly chaotic world that includes rogue plasma waves, flipping magnetic fields and distant solar winds under the thrall of the sun’s rotation, according to University of Michigan researchers who play key roles in NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission.
Our closest-ever look inside the sun’s corona has unveiled an unexpectedly chaotic world that includes rogue plasma waves, flipping magnetic fields and distant solar winds under the thrall of the sun’s rotation, according to University of Michigan researchers who play key roles in NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission.
The U-M findings, part of the first wave of results from the spacecraft that launched in August 2018, provide important insights into two fundamental questions the mission was designed to answer: Why does the sun’s corona get hotter as your move further away from the surface? And what accelerates the solar wind—an outward stream of protons, electrons and other particles emanating from the corona.
Both questions have ramifications for how we predict, detect and prepare for solar storms and coronal mass ejections that can have dramatic impacts on Earth’s power grid and on astronauts.
“Even with just these first orbits, we’ve been shocked by how different the corona is when observed up close,” said Justin Kasper, a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at U-M who serves as principal investigator for Parker’s Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons (SWEAP) instrument suite.
Read more at University of Michigan
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