( Here’s how some scientists are creating solar wind to study in the lab.)Īlso perplexing is the sideways speed of the solar wind. But it’s not yet clear what is launching these kinks or if they will become stronger or more numerous as the spacecraft snuggles closer to the sun. The team calls these features switchbacks, and some scientists suspect that if the waves are depositing energy, they could be playing a role in superheating the solar corona. They last for seconds to minutes, would completely bamboozle a normal compass, and have no obvious source. “Our first question was, What on Earth are these?”ĭuring its first two passes, the Parker Solar Probe encountered maybe a thousand of these waves, which are mammoth locally but too small to detect from Earth. “The wind is moving so fast, and this thing that’s shooting past us is so violent, it actually flips the magnetic field 180 degrees around in under a second,” Kasper says.

Perhaps most stunning among the initial observations are dramatic magnetic waves that sweep through the solar atmosphere, instantly increasing wind speeds by as much as 300,000 miles an hour and, in some cases, causing a complete reversal of the local magnetic field.

So, we have to find some mechanism for throwing energy out into space before depositing it.” Rogue waves in the solar sea “And it actually has to dump that energy. “The sun has to be releasing some extra energy that we don’t see,” says study author Justin Kasper of the University of Michigan. While the star’s face burns at a relatively cool 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the upper corona burns at more than a million degrees. So, too, is the sun’s unfathomably hot atmosphere. But the denser, slower solar wind’s origin is a mystery. “Parker is diving down to where it’s young, and it’s taking observations where it’s fresh.” ( Also find out what the Voyager 2 spacecraft saw when it crossed the boundary between the solar wind and interstellar space.)Īlready, scientists know that the gustier, supersonic breaths originate from cold, magnetic holes in the solar corona. It’s changed, it’s been processed, a lot of the structure, a lot of the things that might tell us how it originated have been smeared out or smoothed out,” Gibson says of the solar wind. “By the time it gets to us, it has evolved. Getting so close to the sun is crucial, since the probe can sample the raw, pristine solar wind that we can’t easily study from Earth.

Over its seven-year mission, the probe will buzz by the sun 24 times, swinging lower on each pass until it finally comes within four million miles of the sun’s surface.Ĭarrying four instruments, the spacecraft is flying through the sun’s corona, taking measurements of the solar atmosphere and trying to sniff out the origin of the solar wind, or clouds of speedy energetic particles that the sun endlessly exhales. The Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 and made its first solar flyby that November. “But if you get a huge space weather event that knocks out a bunch of your technology, that’s a much bigger risk to us here today.” A mission to taste the sun “People think about risks from space, and they often think about the meteor that kills the dinosaurs,” says study author David McComas of Princeton University. Called coronal mass ejections, these dangerous clouds of extremely energetic particles produce shimmering auroras that can bedazzle even mid-latitude skies, but they can also knock out communication satellites, take down power grids, and could be lethal for astronauts. Such intimate observations will untangle basic conundrums in solar physics and could help us better predict harmful solar outbursts aimed at Earth. What would happen if it disappeared entirely? Learn about the star at the center of our solar system, and how it is critical to all life as we know it.

Flying too close to the sun origin