For the First Time in History, a Spacecraft Has 'Touched' the Sun (Tarihte İlk Kez Bir Uzay Aracı Güneşe 'Dokundu')
"My childhood dreams are coming true. I am very happy for myself because of this news."
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In an incredible historic first, a man-made spacecraft dived in and made contact with the Sun.
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To convey the data and technical information details in the original published article in a written article that we and you can understand
Translation and Editing Mehmet Ural #ferrocan
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Parker Solar Probe Enters Magnetically Dominant Solar Corona
"Parker Solar Probe Enters the Magnetically Dominated Solar Corona"
This article with the title was published yesterday. Publication registration, link and information are attached at the end of the article.
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On April 28, 2021, NASA's Parker Solar Probe entered and flew through the solar corona, the Sun's upper atmosphere. The probe not only lived to tell the story, proving the effectiveness of Parker's high-tech heat shielding, but also took measurements at the inspection site, giving us a never-before-seen wealth of data about the heart of our Solar System.
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"The Parker Solar Probe's 'touching of the Sun' is a monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable achievement," said astrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, associate director of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
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"This milestone not only gives us deeper insights into the evolution of our Sun and its effects on our Solar System, but every bit of information we learn about our own star teaches us more about the stars in the rest of the Universe."
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The Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018, the main purpose of which is to probe the solar corona. In its planned seven-year mission, it should be making a total of 26 close approaches or perihelions to the Sun, using a total of seven gravity assist maneuvers to bring Venus even closer. It was the eighth of April perihelion, and it was this maneuver that had truly entered the corona for the first time.
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During his nearly five hours in the solar atmosphere, Parker measured fluctuations in the Sun's magnetic field and sampled the particles. Previously, our estimates of these properties (substances) were based on external information.
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"Flying so close to the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe senses conditions in the magnetically dominant layer of the solar atmosphere—the corona—that we've never been able to do before," said astrophysicist Nour Raouafi, Parker project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
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"We see evidence of it being in the corona in magnetic field data, solar wind data, and visually in images. We can actually see spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed during a total solar eclipse."
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From image 2. The bright features seen in the images here are coronal streamers that are normally only seen from Earth during an eclipse. These were captured by the Parker probe during the ninth perihelion in August this year.
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The Sun does not have a solid surface. Instead, its boundary is defined by what we call the Alfvén critical surface, where gravity and the Sun's magnetic fields are too weak to contain solar plasma.
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Above this point, the solar wind emerges and acts through the Solar System so rapidly that the waves within the wind are separated from the Sun. Far below is the Sun's 'surface', known as the photosphere, made up of plasma from undulating convection cells.
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One of Parker's goals was to learn more about the Alfvén critical surface; i.e. where it was and what its topography was like, because we didn't know any of that. Estimates put the Alfvén critical surface somewhere between 10 and 20 solar radii from the Sun's center. Parker entered the corona at 19.7 solar radii and progressed to 18.4 solar radii during the corona excursion.
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Interestingly, the probe appeared to occasionally encounter the magnetic conditions of the corona, suggesting that the Alfvén critical surface was wrinkled. At lower depths, Parker encountered a magnetic structure known as pseudoflow, which we can see emanating from the Sun during solar eclipses. Parker's data suggest that these structures are responsible for the deformation of the Alfvén critical surface, although we do not currently know why.
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Conditions inside the pseudostreamer were quieter than the surrounding solar atmosphere. The particles no longer swung the spacecraft so erratically, and the magnetic field was more regular.
*Pseudostreamer: Transmitting the images recorded live at a certain time as a live broadcast afterwards.
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Parker also investigated a phenomenon known as solar energy shifts. These are Z-shaped bends in the magnetic field of the solar wind, and where and how they formed is currently unknown. We've known about flashbacks since the 1990s, but until Parker researched them back in 2019, we learned that they're pretty common. Then, on its sixth flight, the probe's data showed us that flashbacks from the patches were occurring.
Parker detected them within the solar atmosphere, suggesting that at least some of the returns came from the lower corona.
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"The structure of the transitive regions matches that of a small magnetic funnel structure at the base of the corona," said astronomer Stuart Bale of the University of California at Berkeley, lead author of a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. . "That's what we expect from some of the theories, suggesting a source for the solar wind itself."
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We still don't know how these interesting structures formed, but with dozens of perihelions approaching 9.86 solar radii from the center of the Sun, we'll likely get some pretty impressive answers.
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"We've been observing the Sun and its corona for decades, and we know there's some interesting physics out there for heating and accelerating solar wind plasma. Still, we can't say exactly what that physics is," Raouafi said.
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"As the Parker Solar Probe now flies into the magnetically dominant corona, we will gain long-awaited insights into the inner workings of this mysterious region."
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Culture and Curiosity group #Kültürvemerak #Science #Article #space articles.
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The research was published in Physical Review Letters yesterday. It was published in "Physical Review Letters".
https://journals.aps.org/.../10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.255101
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This article:
Retrieved 31 October 2021
Revised on November 9, 2021
Accepted 15 November 2021
Released yesterday (December 15, 2021).
Tarihte İlk Kez Bir Uzay Aracı Güneşe 'Dokundu'
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