This surface marks the interface between the Sun’s atmosphere and an outer region of space dominated by the solar wind.
#Planet centauri igg download#
Mission scientists needed several months to download and analyse the data the spacecraft had collected, and to be sure that it had indeed crossed the much-anticipated boundary, known as the Alfvén surface. The Parker probe crossed into the Sun’s atmosphere at 09:33 universal time on 28 April. Flying into the solar corona represents “one of the last great unknowns”, he says. “This is a huge milestone,” says Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is not involved in the mission. With this new front-row seat, scientists can explore some of the biggest unanswered questions about the Sun, such as how it generates the solar wind and how its corona gets heated to temperatures more extreme than those on the Sun’s surface. By contrast, the Parker probe is travelling ever closer to the heart of the Solar System, flying head-on into the solar wind and our star’s atmosphere. In 2012, Voyager 1 travelled so far from the Sun that it became the first mission to leave the region of space dominated by the solar wind - the energetic flood of particles coming from the Sun. In many ways, the Parker Solar Probe is a counterpoint to NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft. A paper describing the findings appears this week in Physical Review Letters 1.
![planet centauri igg planet centauri igg](https://www.science.org/cms/asset/7b7a27cd-db09-47eb-8448-2b1ef787787b/sciadv.2020.6.issue-3.largecover.jpg)
She and other team members spoke during a press conference at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Sun-bombing spacecraft uncovers secrets of the solar wind