A space mission that "contacts the sun"...and leads to a new discovery

 A 'revolutionary' space mission has approached the Sun to reveal its secrets, and has already flown close to our star's surface to make a major discovery. Data from the Parker Solar Probe revealed the source of the solar wind, a stream of energetic particles that flows from the corona, or the sun's hot outer atmosphere, towards Earth.

One of the main motivations behind the mission, named after the late astrophysicist Eugene Parker and launched in 2018, was to determine what the wind looks like when it forms near the sun and how it escapes the star's gravity.

When the probe came within about 20.9 million kilometers from the sun, its instruments detected delicate structures of the solar wind as it is generated near the photosphere, or solar surface, and picked up ephemeral details that disappear once the wind blows from the corona.

The spacecraft was specifically designed to eventually fly within 6.4 million kilometers above the sun's surface, and in late 2021, it became the first mission to "touch" the sun. A detailed study of the solar results was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

What is the solar wind?

• It is a continuous flow of plasma, which contains charged particles such as protons and electrons. The long-range phenomenon also includes part of the solar magnetic field and extends beyond the corona, interacting with planets and the interstellar medium.
• There are two such winds. The faster solar wind flows out of holes in the corona at the sun's poles at a peak speed of 800 kilometers per second
• The slower solar wind, which is in the same plane of the solar system as Earth, flows at a much quieter speed of 400 kilometers per second.
• The fast solar wind does not usually affect the Earth. But during the solar maximum, an 11-year period during which the sun's activity gradually increases, the sun's magnetic field flips.
• This inversion causes coronal holes to pop across the sun's surface and shoot bursts of solar wind directly toward Earth.