At this point, we knew that solar magnetism was behaving in ways we weren’t expecting. SOHO data had revealed that globally, the solar magnetic field was far more variable than we had imagined. And the particles comprising the solar wind, as measured near Earth, had peculiar compositional patterns that didn’t make sense if the wind was emanating directly from the sun’s surface, as had been predicted. It seemed that some kind of magnetic activity in the solar atmosphere was producing that wind — and the corona’s heat — but we didn’t have the models to explain how it worked.
The discussions in the meeting were long and intense, but they laid the foundation for a key decision: There was an absolute need to make observations closer to the sun with a mission notionally called Solar Probe. A model of that spacecraft — a probe that could withstand the harshness of the near-solar environment — was at the front of the meeting room, and after four decades of thinking about it, we were going to make it a reality. In 2017, shortly after I joined NASA as the head of science, the agency renamed the mission after Eugene Parker, based on my recommendation. It was now Parker Solar Probe.
Touching the Sun
Eugene Parker watched as Parker Solar Probe launched from Cape Canaveral in 2018 and rumbled into the sky atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. After the liftoff he thanked me for the honor of having his name on this spacecraft and added, in a rare moment of directness, that he only wished some of those bastards — colleagues who’d derided his ideas and almost cost him his career — were still alive to see this.
The spacecraft used Venus flybys to sling itself successively closer to the sun, and on April 28, 2021, it touched the corona for the first time. It was now the closest spacecraft to our star and the fastest human-made object ever launched. (In fact, last month it passed by the sun for the 18th time at a speed that would get you from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles in about 20 seconds, and from the Earth to the moon in 36 minutes.)
As hoped, the spacecraft’s near-sun observations were groundbreaking for our understanding of coronal heating. The observations solved the issue by decoding magnetic signatures in the extremely near-sun solar wind — a key to learning how the coronal furnace works.
From near Earth, the solar wind looks like a turbulent fluid that is loosely related to the sun at only the largest scales. But from up close, its structure directly reflects the structures on the solar surface. Instead of being a disorganized fluid, the near-sun solar plasma whooshes outward in streamlets that often match the sizes of the convective supergranules on the sun’s surface — the cells around which magnetic fields concentrate, amplify and escape into the corona.
During each solar orbit, the spacecraft zoomed through those streamlets, and it found a telltale fingerprint of magnetic activity that permeated the plasma and pointed to a source for the corona’s heat. Called “switchbacks,” these fingerprints were S-shaped structures formed by brief reversals in the locally measured magnetic field. Such switchbacks form (at least, according to most scientists) when closed magnetic loops collide with open magnetic loops and connect with them, during what’s known as an interchange reconnection event. As with good champagne in a bottle, the only way to release energy and plasma from a tangled, closed magnetic loop is to uncork it by breaking it open and reconnecting it with an open field line. These reconnection events generate heat and sling solar material into space — thus warming the corona and accelerating particles in the solar wind.
Although some scientists aren’t completely convinced the problem is solved, the field is now converging on the conclusion that Parker’s 1988 explanation was right. Coronal heating ultimately depends on magnetic fields at small scales. Convective granules on the solar surface concentrate magnetic fields at their edges and unleash a chain of events that, through subsequent magnetic interactions in the atmosphere, leads to the supersonic solar wind and the million-degree temperatures we see.
Later this year, Parker Solar Probe will break its own record and fly even closer to the sun. Another trip to hell and back, in search of more answers to outstanding solar mysteries.