NASA's Parker Solar Probe has become the first spacecraft to fly through a coronal mass ejection from the sun, and it captured the whole event on camera.
By studying the daredevil feat, scientists will piece together more of the sun's mysterious inner dynamics in a bid to better predict solar eruptions that threaten Earth. They published their findings exactly a year later on Sept. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal."This is the closest to the sun we've ever observed a CME," Nour Raouafi, a Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said in a statement.
The Parker Solar Probe was launched toward the sun in August 2018. The probe is equipped with a heat shield and radiators for close solar encounters, and was flying just 5.7 million miles above the sun's surface when its camera spotted the CME lapping at its flank. The solar probe spent two days observing the sun belch, enabling the physicists to study the CME's evolution in unprecedented detail. The scientists spotted three stages in the eruption's evolution. The first two — the shock wave and solar plasma, followed by the streaming solar wind — had been observed before. But the third stage — a trailing wake of slow-moving particles — baffled them.—Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought.
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