Before Parker could finish all its corona flights, Parker was gone forever.
Illustration of the "Parker" solar probe approaching the sun.
Image credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
On March 15, solar physicist Eugene M. Eugene N. Parker died at his home in Chicago, USA, at the age of 94. The Parker Solar Probe had just finished its 11th of its 24-time overflight program, and along with it crossed the corona, in addition to the 1.1 million public names collected by NASA, parker's photographs, and the epoch-making solar wind paper.
The proposer of the solar wind, the challenger of the traditional solar model, insisting on his theory at the expense of breaking with the lab owner, witnessing the launch of the spacecraft named after himself, these are not enough to outline the complete outline of Parker, and the message he sent to the sun at the age of 91 is just a seemingly simple "Let's see what lies ahead".
The first person to witness the launch of the probe of the same name
In the beginning, the Parker detector was not called Parker.
The probe, which is the closest human to the sun, has been in preparation for more than half a century. NASA has been planning a close visit to the sun since the 1950s, but it wasn't until 2005 that engineers at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University proposed a full Solar Probe mission.
In the original mission proposal, the probe flew over the sun only twice at a maximum distance of 3 million kilometers, estimated to cost up to $1.2 billion, and would also use the relatively resource-constrained plutonium-238 as a power source, which was "reworked" by NASA.
In 2007, when the APL came with a new proposal for a lower price and more flybys, NASA finally approved the unprecedented solar exploration mission and named it Solar Probe Plus. The name was called for more than a decade until Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, who had just joined NASA, wrote to the National Academy of Sciences arguing that the task should be named after a person, and he received a definitive answer, eugene Parker.
NASA had never named a spacecraft after a living figure before, but in 2017, when Zibhun applied to then-ACTING NASA Commissioner Robert Lightfoot for a name change, it didn't get much in the way. Zibhun called Parker to say that NASA wanted to rename the probe "Parker," and Parker on the other end of the phone was surprised and confused.
A few months later, Parker traveled to APL to see the spacecraft built and tested, and Nicola Fox, the mission's project scientist, told him, "Parker, meet 'Parker.'" ”
Eugene Parker (second from right) visits the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland in October 2017, where NASA's Parker solar probe is being assembled.
Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
On August 12, 2018, Parker and his family traveled to the Florida site to watch Parker run toward the sun, and when the engine of the Delta IV Heavy rocket illuminated the early morning skyline of Cape Canaveral, Parker whispered, "We're off." ”
Parker watched "Parker" ascend to heaven at the launch site.
Image credit: NASA
A few months later, Fox traveled to Chicago to share some early data from the Parker probe with Parker. "I saw his eyes light up." Fox said what she showed Parker was not the sun itself, but a faint particle on the sun's side — the solar wind, which Parker predicted more than half a century ago.
The sun is "blowing the wind" to the earth
As early as 1859, scientists observed a link between solar flares and Earth's magnetic storms, and the famous Carrington Event remained the strongest magnetic storm event ever recorded. Only 17% of the intervals between the observance of solar flares and the occurrence of Earth's magnetic storms. For 6 hours, it was impossible to explain what had happened, only that something had run from the sun to earth at a speed of more than 8.5 million kilometers per hour.
The mainstream view and authoritative astronomers at the time believed that space was empty, that there was nothing in it, and that the sun's atmosphere was quiet and inactive. Several scholars in different countries have proposed that the sun is spewing out certain particles, resulting in observed geomagnetic activity, but due to the lack of support from a complete theoretical model and contrary to the mainstream view of the time, it has not been accepted by the academic community.
It wasn't until 1947, when the German astronomer Ludwig Biermann observed that the two tails of a comet always seemed to point in the opposite direction away from the Sun, rather than the opposite direction of the trajectory, that the Sun was speculating that some kind of "solar corpuscular radiation" would "blow" the tail away.
Schematic diagram of the direction of the comet tail
The astronomer traveled thousands of miles from Germany to Chicago, where he found John Alexander Simpson to present his latest research. Simpson, a former leader of the Manhattan Project, co-founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and founder of the Space and Astrophysics Laboratory at the University of Chicago, might have been more acceptable to scholars if he had his support.
Parker had just joined Simpson's Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, and he initially followed Simpson on cosmic rays. Simpson was never persuaded by Birman's conjecture, and did not want to bother any more, so he handed over the research data to Parker and asked Parker to "persuade" Birman to return for him.
Parker carefully studied Birman's observations and conjectures, combined with british mathematician and geophysicist Sydney Chapman's calculations of the heat flowing out of the sun's atmosphere, and came to the opposite conclusion from Simpson: the solar atmosphere is not stationary, but dynamic, and it is spewing out "solar wind"!
Combined with the calculations of his predecessors, Parker believes that the sun's upper atmosphere, that is, the corona, is a good heat conductor at 1 million degrees Celsius, and the temperature is still very high at a distance from the surface of the sun, but the gravitational pull from the sun has dropped significantly, and the outer atmospheric particles can escape to interstellar space at supersonic speed. When near the Earth, this speed will be as high as hundreds of kilometers per second, and the high-speed particle flow interacts with the Earth's magnetic field, resulting in the Phenomenon of Magnetic Storms on the Earth.
Based on this series of discoveries and hypotheses, Parker built a new model of the sun. When he told Simpson his conclusions, he was not only refuting his superiors, but also challenging academic authority, which disappointed Simpson. Parker was in his early thirties.
In 1958, the sun blew toward the academic community
In the face of Parker's stubbornness, Simpson chose to draw a clean line with him, not allowing him to mention his name in the "solar wind" paper, and not allowing him to bring the name of the laboratory, which undoubtedly brought great obstacles to the young scholars who were not well-known in academia and his pioneering theories that subverted traditional cognition.
"You're talking nonsense." "Your idea is good, but it can't be right." "I don't know what went wrong, but you must be wrong."
No academic journal was willing to accept his paper, no scientist agreed with his theory, and reviewers couldn't fault it, but they refused to do so. Parker was unwilling, believing that the fluid dynamics he was using was derived directly from Newton's laws, and that Newton was right when he was right.
In 1958, parker, 31, approached Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, editor-in-chief of The Astrophysical Journal, a physicist and astrophysicist who had deciphered the trajectory of stars' fates, who had publicly torn up papers by his mentor and whose theories he had come up in his twenties were not awarded the Nobel Medal in Physics until he was 73.
Chandrasekhar, who also worked at the University of Chicago, did not agree with Parker's theory at the time, but he remembered the indifference, repression and criticism he had suffered from authorities, believing that Parker should have the opportunity to make his theory public, and the paper was finally published after many tribulations.
Parker published his solar wind paper in the Astrophysical Journal in 1958
A year before the paper was published, the first artificial satellite around the earth had just been launched, and there were no instruments on the satellite to detect material in space, and scientists' research into space was still limited to ground observations. In 1959, the Soviet Union's Luna 1 probe detected persistent solar wind particles in space; in 1962, the U.S. Mariner 2 detected high-velocity charged ion streams released by the sun.
Everyone finally believed that the solar wind really existed. It has had an incredible impact on the workings of the solar system, including our lives on Earth; it envelops the planets in the solar system, protecting us from harmful radiation; and it also disrupts our communications when solar flares occur.
"His name deserves to be written in the sun"
Astrophysics is full of Parker's name: Parker instability, which describes the magnetic field in galaxies; Parker Transport Equation, which describes the motion of particles in plasma; The Sweet-Parker model, which describes the magnetic reconnection of plasma magnetic fields; and the Parker Spiral. Describes a spiraling interplanetary magnetic field; and a Parker Limit, which describes the magnetic monopole flux limit.
In Parker in 1977, during a solar eclipse, the solar wind could be seen in the halo around the sun.
Image credit: University of Chicago
In 1967, at the age of 40, Parker was named a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 1969, Parker received the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship and the Arctowski Medal for heliophysics and the study of solar-Earth relations.
In 1978, Parker became the winner of the first George Ellery Hale Prize.
In 1979, Parker was awarded the Chapman Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society, the same British scientist who had demonstrated good thermal conductivity from the high-temperature corona.
In 1989, Parker received the National Medal of Science.
In 1990, Parker received the William Bowie Medal, the highest award in the American Earth Sciences.
In 1992, Parker received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In 1997, Parker was awarded the Bruce Medal.
In 2003, Parker received the Kyoto Lifetime Achievement Award in Basic Science.
In 2003, Parker won the James Clerk Maxwell Prize.
In 2010, Parker was elected a Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters.
In 2018, Parker received the Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research from the American Physical Society.
In 2020, Parker won the last prize of his life: the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, which in a sense is harder to win than the Nobel Prize.
"Eugene Parker was a legendary scientist whose views of the sun and the solar system were far ahead of his time," said Angela Olinto, chair of physics at the University of Chicago. ”
"Solar physics owes much of its existence to the work of Dr. Eugene Parker, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that," said Nikolai Fox, the solar physicist who led Parker to Parker and now director of the solar physics department at NASA's Washington headquarters. ”