![]() ![]() More CMEs should pass Parker when it’s even closer to the sun, which will tell scientists about how these outbursts are launched. “We got so much data from that,” Raouafi says. On November 29, Parker observed the most powerful flare it had seen in the last three years, followed by a CME that ripped past the spacecraft at 1,400 kilometers per second. But as it wakes up, those signs of increasing magnetic activity become more common and more energetic. During its sleepy period, the sun displays fewer sunspots and outbursts such as flares and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. “But the sun is just beginning to wake up now.”īoth spacecraft have seen solar activity building over the last year. “The sun has been very quiet, in a deep solar minimum for the last several years,” Horbury said. Parker and Solar Orbiter couldn’t have arrived at a better time. “The goal is to connect tiny transient events like nanoflares to changes in the solar wind,” Horbury said in the news briefing. Campfire flares - the “nanoflares” spotted by Solar Orbiter - might even explain the switchbacks, Horbury says. ![]() Meanwhile, Solar Orbiter’s zoomed-in images plus simultaneous measurements of the solar wind may allow scientists to trace the wind’s energetic particles back to their birthplaces on the sun’s surface. “These could be the key to explaining how the solar wind is heated and accelerated,” Raouafi said in a talk recorded for AGU. Others suggest the switchbacks are created by turbulence within the solar wind itself.įiguring out which idea is correct could help pinpoint how the sun produces the solar wind in the first place. Some observations support the idea that the kinks originate at the base of the corona and are carried past Parker and beyond, like a wave traveling along a jump rope. ![]() The results deepen the mystery of magnetic kinks called “switchbacks” that Parker observed in the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing away from the sun ( SN: 12/4/19), Raouafi says. And telescopes on Earth will be watching from a vantage point about 135 million kilometers behind Parker, making a straight line from Earth to the spacecraft to the sun.Īt the AGU meeting, researchers presented new results from Parker’s second year of observations. Both will flank Parker on either side of the sun. Half a dozen other observers will be watching as well, such as ESA’s BepiColombo spacecraft that is on its way to Mercury and NASA’s veteran sunwatcher STEREO-A. The mission’s official science phase won’t begin until November 2021, but the spacecraft has already snapped images revealing tiny “campfire” flares that might help heat the corona ( SN: 7/16/20).ĭuring Parker’s seventh close encounter, which runs January 12–23, Solar Orbiter will observe the sun from a vantage point almost opposite to Parker’s view. Solar Orbiter, though, will get no closer than 42 million kilometers, letting it take the highest-resolution images of the sun ever. During its nearly seven-year mission, the probe will eventually swing within 6 million kilometers of the sun - less than one-seventh the distance of Mercury from the sun - giving Parker’s heavily shielded instruments a better taste of the plasma and charged particles of the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona ( SN: 7/31/18).īecause Parker gets so close, its cameras cannot take direct pictures of the solar surface. The Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 and has already had six close encounters with the sun ( SN: 7/5/18). “We’re all incredibly lucky to be doing this at this moment in time.” Working in tandem ![]() “I think it genuinely is going to be a revolution,” Horbury said. Working together, the sungazers will tackle long-standing puzzles: how the sun creates and controls the solar wind, why solar activity changes over time and how to predict powerful solar outbursts. “Nobody planned to have Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter operating together it’s just come out that way.” “This is partially luck,” solar physicist Timothy Horbury of Imperial College London said December 10 at a news briefing at the virtual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. ![]()
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