{"id":132455,"date":"2021-12-15T10:42:46","date_gmt":"2021-12-15T18:42:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/nasas-parker-solar-probe-touches-the-suns-searing-upper-atmosphere"},"modified":"2021-12-15T10:42:46","modified_gmt":"2021-12-15T18:42:46","slug":"nasas-parker-solar-probe-touches-the-suns-searing-upper-atmosphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/nasas-parker-solar-probe-touches-the-suns-searing-upper-atmosphere","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019S Parker Solar Probe Touches The Sun\u2019s Searing Upper Atmosphere"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-parker-solar-probe-touches-the-suns-searing-upper-atmosphere.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the first time ever, a manmade object has entered the Sun\u2019s outer atmosphere, the corona, which inexplicably is thousands of times hotter than our star\u2019s surface (or photosphere).<\/p>\n<p>Researchers led by a team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were able to predict where the Sun\u2019s upper atmosphere began, and the probe was able to penetrate it for roughly five hours. The Parker probe was not only able to fly through the Sun\u2019s atmosphere but was also able to sample particles and magnetic fields there, says NASA.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFlying so close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the magnetically dominated layer of the solar atmosphere \u2014 the corona \u2014 that we never could before,\u201d Nour Raouafi, the Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a statement. \u201cWe can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On April 28, 2021, during its eighth flyby of the Sun, Parker Solar Probe encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions some 8.1 million miles above the solar surface, NASA reports. That point, known as the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface, marks the end of the solar atmosphere and beginning of the solar wind, says NASA.<\/p>\n<p>The surface of the Sun is about 6,000 Celsius, Justin Kasper, the first author of a paper detailing the research in the journal Physical Review Letters, and a professor of climate and space sciences at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told me. Above that, the temperature rises to more than a million degrees, he says.<\/p>\n<p>Full Story:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time ever, a manmade object has entered the Sun\u2019s outer atmosphere, the corona, which inexplicably is thousands of times hotter than our star\u2019s surface (or photosphere). Researchers led by a team at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor were able to predict where the Sun\u2019s upper atmosphere began, and the probe [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}