NASA’s Parker Solar Probe — which has flown closer to the Sun than any spacecraft ever — has beamed back the first observations from its close encounters with the Sun, revealing a “spectacular trove” of data about the solar wind and space weather, the US space agency said.
The data from the probe, published in the journal Nature, offers clues to long-standing mysteries, including why the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface, as well as the precise origins of the solar wind.