Parker Solar Probe Captures Closest-Ever Images Of The Sun

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, it’s Flora Lichtman. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

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Today on the show, the Sun like we’ve never seen it before.

NOUR RAWAFI: What Parker Solar Probe is telling us is opening our eyes on the physics that is happening right there in the solar atmosphere that drives all this stuff we get here on Earth.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In December, the Parker Solar Probe made history when it made the closest approach to the Sun ever. The spacecraft skimmed the Sun’s corona, its outer atmosphere. And as the Parker Solar Probe whizzed by, a camera on board snapped a few images, showing us the Sun’s surface and the supercharged particles beaming out of it in unprecedented detail.

Here to answer our burning Sun questions is Dr. Nour Rawafi, Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Nour, welcome back to Science Friday.

NOUR RAWAFI: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, how close did the Parker Solar Probe get to the Sun?

NOUR RAWAFI: The Sun-Earth distance, on average, is about 93 million miles. Parker Solar Probe got within 3.8 million miles from the surface of the Sun.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That sounds far, but I’m hearing that that is actually quite close.

NOUR RAWAFI: So Parker Solar Probe got so close, it’s within 4% of the Sun-Earth distance. If that distance was about 1 yard, Parker Solar Probe would be about an inch away from the Sun. So for the first time in history, we are not just observing the Sun. We are flying through its atmosphere. The structure that we see during a total solar eclipse, Parker Solar Probe is flying through them, sampling them, and teaching us about them for the first time in history. And that’s something remarkable that we have been waiting for 60 years now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How hot was it?

NOUR RAWAFI: That environment is extremely hot. The temperature of the gas is in the multi-million degrees hot. But Parker Solar Probe is flying through it, and it’s doing it so well that after seven years of orbiting the Sun, it is still extremely healthy, and it is really ready to go for many years to come.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How big of a deal are these images that you captured?

NOUR RAWAFI: This is something fascinating. You go back for decades, we have been observing our star, the Sun, from afar. But the first time, we are really sampling that medium locally. It’s the very medium where all the action is happening, the action that drives space weather and everything. And the images that you have seen, it’s mind boggling. You see details that we’ve never had access to before. You see, for example, the flows of the solar wind, that is something fascinating. We did not have these views before.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What are the pictures telling us that we didn’t know before?

NOUR RAWAFI: So in addition to these small details about the solar wind flows in general, we also have these multiple CMEs that are racing one after the other.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s a CME?

NOUR RAWAFI: A CME is Coronal Mass Ejection. It’s basically a ball of magnetized gas that erupts from the Sun and will travel in the solar system. Some of them, they will be directed toward us here on Earth, and they will cause storms, like the one we had last year in May 2024.

FLORA LICHTMAN: A coronal mass ejection– is that the same as a solar flare?

NOUR RAWAFI: Solar flares, usually, they are linked to coronal mass ejection. But the flares are very low down in the solar surface, where the magnetic fields reconnect to produce temperatures of many, many million degrees hot. And they accelerate particles to almost the speed of light.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so tell me what you learned about these coronal mass ejections.

NOUR RAWAFI: So what we’ve seen in these few images we released so far is we have a series of CMEs that are basically racing each other, one after the other. And what happened, they all merge into one single front. It is like we have a traffic jam of solar storms. And that thing is so fascinating. It’s so relevant. It’s really fundamental to understand these dynamics in order for us to have a handle on space weather in the future.

FLORA LICHTMAN: NASA released a video made up of these images. And we’ll have it on our website. You can check it out at sciencefriday.com/sun. And maybe you can help me describe it, but basically, in these images, the background is black. You can see some stars. And then in the front, there are these wispy, white smoky feathers. And it looks like it’s all moving. Is that how you describe it?

NOUR RAWAFI: Yes. So in the images actually released, you see structure in the solar corona that we see during a total solar eclipse. And all of these are part of the normal solar wind. And we have what we call streamers. We have coronal holes. And they are all filled with gas. It’s tenuous. And some of them, they are brighter than others because they are denser.

But when we get really close, we start seeing the details of a thin layer that separates the two magnetic hemispheres of the Sun, the two poles of the Sun, if you will. One, it is negative. One is positive. And what is fascinating within this thin layer, you see basically a river of material that is flowing. The closest thing I can think of, if you have a river, on top of it, it’s carrying ice, that’s, in a way, a very close description of what we see in this heliospheric current sheet.

But there, again, these tiny structures are pretty complex. And every one of them is like– it behaves on its own. But after that, what we have, we have, really, the big guys, the coronal mass ejections. And they come in, and they basically change the whole scene in front of us. But on top of that, they interact between each other. And this interaction is so important because from decades of observations, we learned that the events that drive strong geospace storms are multiple CMEs, one after the others.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so a storm is made of a bunch of coronal mass ejections.

NOUR RAWAFI: Yes. These are more potent. They will drive stronger storms on the Earth and on the Earth atmosphere here, if we have one after the other and after the other. That’s exactly what happened last year in May 2024.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hmm. And so we didn’t how they interacted until we could see them with this probe?

NOUR RAWAFI: So we’ve seen hints of CMEs interacting before from previous observations from 1 AU, which is around Earth. But there, we didn’t really have much details at all. The quality of the data is not as good as what we are getting with Parker Solar Probe.

Let me put it this way. If you are observing a football game from, let’s say, half a mile away, you basically see the stadium and a little bit here and there. But when you are in the stadium itself, you are seeing everything in detail. That’s exactly the difference between observing the Sun and the corona from around Earth and with Parker Solar Probe.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s amazing. Have you seen anything yet or hints of anything yet that sort of upends our current thinking about the Sun, anything that’s going to make our textbooks obsolete?

NOUR RAWAFI: There are many, many things. And we launched Parker Solar Probe to learn about this big challenging phenomena that– by the way, they are not unique to our star, the Sun. We see them also in many, many other stars in the universe. And what we are learning from Parker Solar Probe is getting so close to come to a full understanding of this phenomena. For example, why the solar corona, the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, is over 300 times hotter than the solar surface, and how the solar wind is– it’s flying so fast to escape the solar gravity.

And obviously, whenever we have these big storms, they accelerate particles to a good fraction of the speed of light, making them a hazard to astronauts, to satellites out there. And when they are severe enough even to the ground here, to the power grid, for example, or space traffic, what Parker Solar Probe is telling us is opening our eyes on the physics that is happening right there in the solar atmosphere that drives all this stuff we get here on Earth.

We are there to discover a medium, to explore a medium that we never had a chance to visit before. With every dive close to the Sun, we are learning more and more, and we are getting surprised every orbit that Parker Solar Probe is doing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It sounds like it must be just really boring for you.

NOUR RAWAFI: [LAUGHS] Quite boring, except that every three months, we get a new load of data. And we are like these small kids excited about their birthdays. We are also– every three months, we are waiting for a present from Parker Solar Probe. And Parker Solar Probe never, never disappointed us. We always had plenty of things to play with.

And I can tell you, now, after seven years of orbiting the Sun, we are still scratching the surface about the data we got from Parker Solar Probe. It is so loaded of physics, of new phenomena. It will take us decades to make sense of everything. And we are not going to have another mission like it in our lifetimes. We better make the most we can with it, as long as it is healthy in providing data.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Coming up after the break, will we ever have a solar weather forecast? And why Nour thinks we should be working towards one.

NOUR RAWAFI: If we get one of those storms, the consequences are going to be quite, quite big. So there is an estimate out there that the economic losses will be in the trillions of dollars.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: And we’ve been talking about solar weather. And I’ve read pieces that really can go to the worst case scenario, where not just minor electrical interference on Earth, but that these solar– a perfect sun storm could cause a worldwide blackout. I’m curious, as someone who studies this, where is that on your worry list?

NOUR RAWAFI: Well, actually, I have two opinions about it. If you ask the rational me, I hope that this type of storms will not happen anytime soon because as you said, I mean, the potential for damage and economic loss is big, if we have one of these events like the Carrington Event of 1859. But–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, tell me about that, for people who don’t know.

NOUR RAWAFI: The Carrington Event in 1859 is the strongest solar storm in all recorded history. So we usually, in typical– in normal times, we see aurorae around the poles of the Earth during night time. During that storm, aurora was seen around the globe during the day.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow.

NOUR RAWAFI: Which is so fascinating. These are so, so powerful.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So aurora during the day. Was there damage, too?

NOUR RAWAFI: For example, the telegraph caught fire. Many stations of telegraph caught fire because of that storm. But now imagine that we have all this technology in space. We have all this infrastructure on the ground. If we get one of those storms, the consequences are going to be quite, quite big. So there is an estimate out there that the economic losses will be in the trillions of dollars.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. OK, so you said you were of two opinions. What’s the other?

NOUR RAWAFI: So the other opinion is the scientist in me says, you know what? Let this storm happen. And I’m speaking as a scientist because I want to learn. I want to understand what happens. But again, there are two sides of every one of us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Can the Parker Solar Probe help us predict weather events like this?

NOUR RAWAFI: I think the ultimate goal is basically to have the ability to predict space weather like we do for Earth weather. For space, we are probably several decades behind. But let me give you just one example of this, why we have to do that, why we have to reach that milestone. If you look now at the low Earth orbit, that space is so congested. We have thousands and thousands of satellites. And in the future, it’s going to be tens of thousands of satellites.

Whenever we have a storm from the Sun that heats the Earth’s atmosphere, it will cause disturbances. And many of these satellites, they will deviate from their nominal orbits. And during a certain period of time, we don’t have all the information where they are.

And imagine that we have one or two or three collisions, and they will create thousands of pieces of debris that are flying at high speed in that environment. So basically, what we will have, we will have a cascade of collisions. And that will be so hazardous. Basically, potentially, it has the potential to make that space unusable. And that’s really a big, big loss.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s zoom out just a tiny bit. What are some of the big mysteries about the Sun, the things we still don’t understand?

NOUR RAWAFI: There are many of them. I talked about the solar activity in general, flares and CMEs. But when you look even deeper into the solar interior, we don’t know much about it. Let me give you one example. We know that the magnetic activity on the Sun has a cycle that we call the solar cycle, that is, on average, 11 years long. We discovered the solar cycle about 300 years ago, and to this day, we don’t really have an understanding what lies behind the solar cycle.

Let me even push it a little bit further. We know that the energy that powers the Sun as a star, and consequently, the whole solar system, and sustain our lives here on Earth, it’s coming from the core of the Sun, and it goes through nuclear fusion. But we have absolutely no idea how that is happening.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

NOUR RAWAFI: We don’t know– we almost know nothing about the core of the Sun. We don’t have the data. And that begs the question– well, we have this laboratory that is the star out there that is doing fusion every second of the day. It begs the question, if we could learn a little bit about that, would that help us here to potentially, at a certain point in the future, we will have the ability also to reproduce nuclear fusion on Earth. That will provide clean energy for all humanity.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That seems useful.

NOUR RAWAFI: Absolutely.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] Do you feel like you have a different relationship with that big glowing ball in the sky than most people? When you step out on a beautiful sunny day, do you think you think about the Sun differently?

NOUR RAWAFI: Probably I think a little bit differently about it. But ultimately, each one of us, by birth, we are linked to the Sun, whether we realize it or we don’t. We have, really, a linkage, an emotional– and even further than that, if the Sun, for example, is not out there for three or four days, we don’t feel good.

Let me give you just a small story about my seven-year-old. About two years ago, when he was five, I was getting him ready to school in the morning. And it was raining for three days almost continuously. And usually, he’s a happy guy. He’s really– you know. But that morning, he was sitting on the glass door, waiting for me to drive him to school. And he was not his cheerful self.

I asked him, Adam, what is going on? Why you are not happy? And he told me, well, you see, it’s the weather. It’s been raining for two days, or I think it was three days at that time. Then I asked him, what would make you happy? Without thinking for an instant, he told me sunlight.

I’m studying the Sun for almost a quarter of a century now, but at that moment, he taught me something that I didn’t realize before. It’s our link to the Sun, our relationship to the Sun. It goes way, way deeper than just science and all that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s profound.

NOUR RAWAFI: It is very profound.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Nour, thank you so much for joining me today.

NOUR RAWAFI: Thank you. It’s really a pleasure. Thank you so much.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Nour Rawafi is the Parker Solar Probe project scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

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Today’s episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to rate and review us if you like the show. And you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We’d love to hear from you. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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