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View transcript
This is the American Geophysical Union. 15,000 scientists come here pretty much every year, crossing all of geology, physics, planetary science. This is one of the key places to get your science results out and to talk to scientists in other fields. It's really a lot of fun. We've just published four papers in Nature science magazine that gives some new results from the first two orbits of Parker Solar Probe. It's pretty impressive. Every time we've got someplace new, we've been surprised. We're seeing things about the origin of the solar wind and why the corona is hot that we don't completely understand yet, but that's the fun of science. We're puzzled, but this is the key to understanding some basic science questions about the Sun. Why is the corona hotter than the surface of the Sun? A thousand times hotter than the surface of the Sun! Normally when you get further away from a heat source like a fire you get colder. How is this weird condition where the corona is a couple million degrees and the surface is only six thousand degrees? We knew we'd had to do with the magnetic field probably, but the exact mechanism was not known and we still don't know exactly, but we're starting to see key waves and switchbacks in the magnetic field that are pointing us in the direction and these things will dump energy into the corona and are probably what's heating it. A lot of the solar wind comes from these things called coronal holes, which is where the magnetic field from the Sun goes out into the distant solar system and actually blow a bubble in interstellar space. A lot of the magnetic field lines from the Sun actually go up out of the surface and then connect back in. Sunspots and other active regions and stuff, but it's the open field lines that really are what cause the solar wind, what causes the corona to be hot, and so we're flying over some of these coronal holes and seeing little jets and little events that get washed out in the 93 million miles between the Sun and the earth and so only by going where the action is can we really start to see them and now hopefully understand them. Over the next five years there's going to be lots more results. You know, this is just the start and it's already super exciting. This is why NASA does these missions. This one is answering some basic questions about not only our Sun, but they help us understand all the stars in the universe. Because our Sun is the only one that we can travel directly to.

Total Solar Eclipse: Stories from the Path of Totality

Catching Up with Parker Solar Probe

Published:   January 21, 2020
Total Running Time:   00:02:34

The sun gives us light and heat and keeps our planetary orbit in place—but there's so much we don't know about it. NASA's Parker Solar Probe is currently orbiting the sun to gather data and learn more. Join Eric Christian, a research scientist on the Parker Solar Probe mission, and learn more about what information the probe is bringing us and what we can learn from it. 

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