The first scientific results of the Parker Solar Probe mission were released today in a series of four papers published in the journal Nature.

The measurements revealed a slew of insight into the sun’s magnetic field, how solar winds flow, and more.

Parker Solar Probe has five more years left in its mission to unlock even more secrets about the physics of our nearest and dearest star.

Parker Solar Probe has kissed the sun, and now its telling us everything.

In just one short year, the probe’s initial observations have already unraveled decades-long mysteries about our home star. The probe has revealed insight into the formation and structure of solar winds, the connection between coronal mass ejections and energized particles, and the shape of the sun’s twisting magnetic field. These first scientific measurements were reported in a series of four papers published today in the journal Nature.

The probe, which launched in August 2018, has since zipped two times closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft in history and has broken the spacecraft speed record, too. (It's the fastest ever.)

“This is the first time we’ve been able to fly a spacecraft into the atmosphere of a star, and that alone, to me, is just so exciting,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a press conference today.

The probe is equipped with a suite of high tech instruments that are specially engineered to withstand the blistering effects of the sun’s rays.

The FIELDS instrument is made up of five antennas and tracks the sun’s electric and magnetic fields. The shoebox-sized WISPR is the probe’s only imager, taking snapshots of the sun’s corona and any solar mass ejections it happens to capture. A team of four instruments, SWEAP counts particles that are flung out into space to better understand their impact on the solar system. Finally, ISOIS is composed of complementary instruments that measure the energies of different particles.

Surprises Riding in on Solar Winds

The mission’s goal is to “understand the sources and structure of the solar wind up close right as it leaves the sun,” said physicist Stuart Bale of the University of California, Berkeley, in the press conference. “What Parker has done has got us closer than ever to the Sun and now we can really see a lot of structure and we can see in this case we can clearly see a source of the wind.”

Parker’s data revealed a surprising source of our sun’s solar winds. “We see that the solar wind is slow, it’s highly magnetized, and it’s emerging from a very small coronal hole at the equator,” said Bale. “It’s at lower altitudes than we expected originally.”

Previously, scientists had witnessed solar winds escaping from coronal holes near the sun’s poles, but this is the first time they’ve observed the activity at lower latitudes.

Instruments also shed light on the structure of the sun’s winds. “We see that the solar wind is very bursty,” said Bale. “Yes, there’s a radial flow outward, but on top of that, there are huge magnetic structures and waves.”

The probe also encountered highly magnetized, rogue magnetic waves called switchbacks, which increased the speeds of solar wind more than 300,000 miles per hour in just a matter of seconds.

“These waves are so strong, they actually flip the direction of the solar field,” said climate and astrophysicist Justin Kasper, of the University of Michigan, in the press conference. “These are very large and energetic events,” said Kasper, a principal investigator who oversees the SWEAP series of instruments.



Parker encountered about 1,000 of these strong wave events. Researchers believe they could provide insight into how energy from the sun transfers to and heats up the surrounding atmosphere. “Now we can go look at the surface of the sun and figure out what’s launching [these waves] into space,” Kasper said.

Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory, NASA

Finally, Parker’s data indicated the surprising ways solar winds reach super-high speeds. As solar winds travel farther and farther from the sun’s surface, they gain momentum. “To our surprise, when we got close to the sun, we found a large and growing rotation of the wind around the sun,” Kasper said in the press conference. Parker detected a rotational flow around the sun 15 to 20 times larger than what previous models predicted.

The speed at which these winds rotate can determine the speed at which the sun itself rotates.

“The rotation of that wind is the dominant way that our sun and other stars lose angular momentum and spin down as the age,” Kasper said. Additionally, tracking the rotational flow of solar winds can help scientists better predict when coronal mass ejections—or mammoth eruptions of solar material spit out by the sun’s corona—may occur.

It’s one of the most important reasons why we study the sun. These massive bursts of solar material hurtle toward Earth at alarming rates, disabling communications, defense satellites, and other equipment upon arrival. These coronal mass ejections also ferry particles that can harm astronauts outside of Earth’s protective electromagnetic field.



Peculiar Particles

Coronal mass ejections also accelerate streams of energetic particles, which are made up of super-fast protons, electrons, and ions, and can similarly jeopardize equipment and personnel not protected by the Earth’s magnetosphere. Energetic particles are much faster than solar wind, but inflict similar damage.

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“These are very high energy, very fast and little particles that are really important for space exploration,” said astrophysicist Dave McComas of Princeton University, who oversees the ISIOS investigation, in the press conference. “We're able to start to untangle how they get energized these high levels and we're also starting to understand how they get transported from the place where they're energized out into the solar wind.



Bursts of these particles may act as a precursor to coronal mass ejection events. Right before Parker witnessed a coronal mass ejection, it picked up on a “very small and low energy” burst of energetic particles. “We saw that nearly a full day ahead of the coronal mass ejection,” said McComas.

So far, Parker has witnessed many events where energetic particles are being ejected from the sun. “There seems to be a spectrum or continuum of of particle events,” McComas said. “They get smaller and smaller and smaller and we're only able to see because we're so very close to the sun. They get completely washed out as you get closer to Earth’s orbit.”

No Dust in the Wind

And now, perhaps the most exciting and long-awaited revelation: the concentration of dust surrounding the sun. “We also found a very unusual decrease in the interplanetary dust scattering as the Parker Solar Probe approached the sun,” said Russ Howard, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., in the press conference.

The accumulation of dust around the sun has proved to be a significant point of interest for astronomers. For years, scientists have predicted there’s a dust-free zone surrounding the sun. “The idea that dust particles close to the sun could not survive and would disappear by sublimation due to the very intense heat was predicted nearly a hundred years ago, but never seen,” Howard said.

Currently, Parker is enmeshed in a sea of fine dust particles—so much so that one of its apertures was actually pierced by a tiny, tiny speck of dust and is now out of commission. (What can we say? Space is hard.) Whenever dust hits the spacecraft, it generates a small spark of electricity, which signals to the researchers that Parker has been hit and from which direction the particles are coming.

For decades, scientists have suspected there must be a zone around the sun that’s completely free of dust. WHISPR’s data show the dust starts to thin out at around 20 solar radii through about 10 solar radii, at which point the instrument’s field of view is limited, according to Howard. (For reference, one solar radius is roughly equivalent to 432,000 miles.) Parker is currently about 36 solar radii away from the sun. Eventually, Howard said, the probe will actually reach the proposed dust-free zone.

Parker also revealed how smooth the boundary between our dusty solar system and the sun is. “We don’t see any sudden decreases indicating that some material has evaporated,” said Howard. “Ultimately these observations are going to tell us more about the physics of the sublimation process and the kind of material that makes up the dust in this region.”

The Final Countdown

Scientists are eager to see what’s in store for the rest of the mission. The measurements reported today were collected when the probe was approximately almost 15 million miles from the sun. (The average distance between the sun and Mercury, for reference, is about 36 million miles.)



Within the next five years, Parker will sweep even closer, to a distance of almost 4 million miles from the star’s surface. “We’ve waited for decades and decades to understand these mysteries,” said Fox.

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