“First mission to ‘touch’ the sun catches the solar wind| CNN”
A solar mission that has been spiraling closer to the sun to unravel its secrets has flown near enough to our star’s surface to make a key discovery.
Data from the Parker Solar Probe has uncovered the source of solar wind, a stream of energized particles that flow from the corona, or the sun’s hot outer atmosphere, toward Earth.
One of the key motivations behind the mission, named for the late astrophysicist Eugene Parker and launched in 2018, was to determine what the wind looks like as it forms near the sun and how it escapes the star’s gravity.
As the probe came within about 13 million miles (20.9 million kilometers) of the sun, its instruments detected fine structures of the solar wind where it generates near the photosphere, or the solar surface, and captured ephemeral details that disappear once the wind is blasted from the corona.
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Link contributed by Gene Savoy.
