"The amount of light hitting the Parker Solar Probe determines how hot the spacecraft will get," Case explains. A scientific paper describing the milestone has been accepted for publication in the Physical Review Letters.ĬfA astrophysicist Anthony Case, the instrument scientist for the Solar Probe Cup, says the instrument itself is an incredible feat of engineering. "That's the region we've flown into - an area where the plasma, atmosphere and wind are magnetically stuck and interacting with the Sun."Īccording to data collected by the cup, the spacecraft entered the corona three times on April 28, at one point for up to five hours.
Parts of sun corona free#
"If you look at close-up pictures of the Sun, sometimes you'll see these bright loops or hairs that seem to break free from the Sun but then reconnect with it," Stevens explains. Prior to April 28, the spacecraft had been flying just beyond this point. The Alfvén point is when solar winds exceed a critical speed and can break free of the corona and the Sun's magnetic fields. The corona is the outermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere where strong magnetic fields bind plasma and prevent turbulent solar winds from escape. So, a basic part of this mission is to be able to measure whether or not we crossed this critical point." "The only way to do that is for the spacecraft to cross the outer boundary, which scientists call the Alfvén point.
We can accomplish this by flying into the solar atmosphere," says Michael Stevens, an astrophysicist at the CfA who helps monitor the cup.
"The goal of this entire mission is to learn how the Sun works. The cup collects particles from the Sun's atmosphere that helped scientists verify that the spacecraft had indeed crossed into the corona. The historic moment was achieved thanks to a large collaboration of scientists and engineers, including members of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) who built and monitor a key instrument onboard the probe: the Solar Probe Cup. On April 28, the Parker Solar Probe successfully entered the corona of the Sun - an extreme environment that’s roughly 2 million degrees Fahrenheit. "That improves models of CMEs, opening the door to new science and leading to more accurate space weather forecasts."įollow Samantha Mathewson Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.Cambridge, MA - A spacecraft launched by NASA has done what was once thought impossible. "With our technique, we can capture the dynamic beginnings of coronal mass ejections and see how they're born out into the heliosphere," Seaton said in the statement.
2 in the journal Nature Astronomy (opens in new tab), could help forecasters better detect and track solar eruptions, also known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), that pose a potential threat to Earth. "We didn't think there was such a deep connection between these regions, but now we know they're interacting all the time," Seaton said in the statement. This video captures plasma in the sun's middle corona at two different temperatures (gold: 1.4 million degrees Fahrenheit or 800,000 degrees Celsius blue: 2.7 million F or 1.5 million C), revealing how the charged particles flow in and out of the middle region, creating a connection between the the inner corona and the outer corona, as well as the heliosphere.
0 kommentar(er)
