Parker probe “touches” the sun for the first time

American researchers revealed that a spacecraft was able to get close to the sun to an unprecedented degree and “touch” it.
According to the scientific journal “Physical Review Letters”, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, on April 28, flew in and through the solar corona (the upper atmosphere of the sun) and took measurements from its location.

The magazine noted that researcher Justin Kasper from the University of Michigan and his colleagues observed three periods in which the probe measures the quasi-vincine solar wind speed and low plasma density, which indicates a boundary crossing. The last two of these periods were short, but the first, which lasted nearly 5 hours, was exceptional.
“Observations that the thermal and kinetic energy of the particles were dominated by magnetic energy and that the magnetic pressure was high provided unequivocal evidence that the probe had indeed crossed into the magnetically controlled solar corona,” Kasper said.
“The Parker Solar Probe Touch the Sun is a tremendous moment for solar science and a truly remarkable achievement,” said astrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, associate director of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. Not only does this achievement provide us with deeper insights into the evolution of our Sun and its effects on our solar system. But everything we learn about our star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe.”

“Parker Solar Probe is flying close to the sun, and is now sensing conditions in the magnetically dominant layer of the solar atmosphere — the corona — that we haven’t been able to before,” said astrophysicist Noor Rawafi, Parker Project Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Laboratory of Applied Physics. “The presence of the corona is in the magnetic field data, the solar wind data, and optically in the images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through the coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.”

Parker also investigated a phenomenon known as switching to solar energy, the magazine added. These are the Z-shaped faults in the magnetic field of the solar wind, and it is not known where or how they form.
Astronomer Stuart Bell, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: “The structure of the bouncing regions matches the structure of a small magnetic funnel at the base of the corona. This is what we would expect from some theories, and this identifies a source of the solar wind itself.”
“We still don’t know how these strange structures formed, but with dozens of perihelion in front of us, roughly 9.86 solar radii closer to the center of the Sun, we’re likely to get some pretty cool answers,” he added.
One of Parker’s goals was to learn more about Alfvén’s critical surface; That is, where it is and how it looks topographically. Estimates place Alfvén’s critical surface somewhere between 10 and 20 solar radii from the center of the Sun. Parker entered the corona at 19.7 solar radii, and decreased to as much as 18.4 solar radii during the corona’s flight.