Bringing the sun into the lab: Liquid-metal experiment provides insight into the heating mechanism of the sun’s corona
Why the Sun’s corona reaches temperatures of several million degrees Celsius is one of the great mysteries of solar physics. A “hot” trail to explain this effect leads to a region of the solar atmosphere just below the corona, where sound waves and certain plasma waves travel at the same speed. In an experiment using […]
A spacecraft has ‘touched’ the sun for the first time
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached the sun’s extended solar atmosphere, known as the corona, and spent five hours there. The spacecraft is the first to enter the outer boundaries of our sun. “This marks the achievement of the primary objective of the Parker mission and a new era for understanding the physics of the corona,” […]