NASA: “We have touched the Sun”

Icarus tried it many millennia ago and the dream of reaching the Sun was that of many men. Now it’s a little bit closer. The announcement is from NASA: “For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the sun. NASA’s Solar Parker probe flew through the outermost part of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, and sampled particles and magnetic fields ».

It is a historic and huge step to better understand how our star works. Thomas Zurbuchen, on the board of the scientific mission at the headquarters of NASA in Washington he explained: “Not only does this milestone provide us with more in-depth information on the evolution of the Sun and its impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our star it also teaches us more about all the stars in the universe».

It is not the first discovery by Parker, a probe that has gone where no other halfway from Earth has ever done. In 2019 he noticed the zigzag magnetic structures in the solar wind, the hairpin bends. Now she has come to understand that they form on the solar surface. “By flying this close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe detects conditions in the solar atmosphere, the corona, that we have never been able to detect before,” says Nour Raouafi, who works on the project at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The spacecraft was launched in 2018 to reach the sun’s superheated atmosphere, made of solar material that is bound to the sun by gravity and magnetic forces. For the first time it crossed the critical surface of Alfvén, that of the border between the end of the solar atmosphere and the beginning of the solar wind that researchers had never been able to identify with certainty. On April 28, 2021, in its eighth overflight of the Sun, Parker Solar Probe crossed this border. Scientists figured this out because it encountered specific magnetic and particle conditions at 18.8 solar rays, about 8.1 million miles, above the sun’s surface.