You may
have heard the news by now that NASA's Parker Solar Probe made history this
year, being the very first spacecraft to "touch the Sun". Well now
there is videotape of the probe flying through the Sun's corona, and to say it
is spectacular is the understatement of the year without a doubt. And yes, that
is the Milky Way, as seen through the Sun's "atmosphere", special visitor
starring.
Parker is
no stranger to classic firsts and breaking chronicles. This year it broke the record
to become the closest man-made object to the Sun at 8.5 million kilometers (5.3
million miles) from the surface of Sun. It also cracked its own record to again
be the quickest man-made object of all time.
Its most
recent significant milestone, though, comes with video footage. Take a ride over
the Sun's corona, Milky Way and all.
Not being concrete,
the Sun lacks a definite boundary as to where it stops and space begins. The
corona is stated to as the Sun's atmosphere and symbolizes the region in which
solar material is reserved by gravity and magnetic fields. This point is called
the Alfvén critical surface and marks the end of the solar atmosphere and the start
of the solar wind. Until now, researchers weren't precisely sure where the
Alfvén serious surface lay.
It's not
just a breathtaking video though. What Parker Solar Probe finds there, and as
it wings its way even closer in the next few years, will change what we know
about our star forever.
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