Recently, NASA announced that the Parker Solar Probe successfully crossed the solar atmosphere for the first time, withstanding a high temperature of about 930,000 ° C, becoming the first man-made object for human beings to "touch" the sun.
Parker Solar Probe
The Parker Solar Probe was launched by the United States on August 11, 2018, and in order to withstand the high temperature, this thing about 3 meters high is wrapped in a 12-centimeter-thick carbon composite protective cover, which is the first probe for humans to approach the sun.
On November 28, 2021, the Parker Solar Probe approached the Sun for the 10th time, only 8.53 million kilometers from the surface of the Sun, entering the Solar Atmosphere for the first time at a speed of 163 km/s.
Parker flew over the sun
Here, Parker was tested at temperatures of nearly a million degrees (extremely thin plasma layers) and measured precious solar wind and plasma data that would be sent back to Earth when it was far away from the sun.
Many people may not be very sensitive to data, thinking that 8.53 million kilometers away from the surface of the sun is how to touch the sun? You must know that the moon is also 380,000 kilometers away from the earth, which is 22 times the distance between the earth and the moon!
The surface of the Sun
First of all, we should understand that the distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 150 million kilometers, the travel of light from the Sun to the Earth takes about 8 minutes, and 8.53 million kilometers is about one-eighteenth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Of course, since the Earth revolves around the Sun, this data is not fixed and may increase or decrease by millions of kilometers.
The Sun is the center of the solar system, with a diameter of about 1.392 million kilometers, it is the largest celestial body in the solar system, capable of holding 1.3 million Earths, and the mass accounts for 99.8% of the mass of the entire solar system.
The sun is divided into a core layer and an atmosphere, of which the core layer is the source of the sun's huge energy, where the temperature exceeds 15 million ° C, and the pressure is also very large, so that hydrogen can be condensed into helium, thereby releasing huge energy.
The atmosphere is divided into three layers, from the inside to the outside are the photosphere, the chromosphere and the coronal layer. Among them, the temperature of the photosphere is about 4000 to 6000 °C, with a thickness of about 500 kilometers; the temperature of the chromosphere is about thousands to tens of thousands of degrees, with a thickness of about 8000 kilometers; the temperature of the coronal layer is as high as one million degrees Celsius, and the thickness is up to several solar radii.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, about 58 million kilometers from the Surface of the Sun, and can no longer get any closer, otherwise it will be pulled by the huge Gravity of the Sun and become part of the Sun.
Mercury
It can be seen that the Parker Solar Probe flew over 8.53 million kilometers above the surface of the sun and has completely entered the solar coronal layer, almost flying close to the sun. Describing "touching" the sun is not an exaggeration.
According to NASA's plan, Parker will continue to use the gravitational pull of Venus to continue to approach the sun, the most recent of which will be 6.5 million kilometers away from the sun, so that humanity can further understand the sun.
sun
China also launched the first solar probe "Xihe" in October this year, which will realize the world's first space exploration of the Hα band spectral imaging of the sun, but this is a sun-synchronous orbit running 517 kilometers above the earth, not close to the sun.