Science Friday - Parker Solar Probe Captures Closest-Ever Images Of The Sun

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

In December, the Parker Solar Probe made history when it made the closest-ever approach to the sun by a spacecraft. As it whizzed by, a camera recorded incredibly detailed images, which show the sun��s surface, the flow of solar winds, and eruptions of magnetized balls of gas. Seeing this activity in such detail could help scientists understand solar weather.Host Flora Lichtman talks with Parker Solar Probe project scientist Nour Rawafi about what these images show and how the probe could fundamentally change our understanding of the sun.Guest:Dr. Nour Rawafi is the Parker Solar Probe project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the show, the sun like we've never seen it before. What Parker's Rope is telling us is opening our eyes on the physics that is happening. Right there in the solar atmosphere that drives all this stuff who get here and her. 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. Norah Rwaffe, Parker Solar Probe, Project Scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

Nor, welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you very much. Thank you for having to me. Okay. How close did the Parker Solar Probe give? yet to the sun? The sun-earth distance on average is about 93 million miles. Parcassolrop got within 3.8 million miles from the surface of the sun. That sounds far, but I'm hearing that that is actually quite close. So Parkasolrop got so close. It's within 4% of the sun-earth distance. If that distance was about one yard, Parkasolropo will be about an inch away from the sun. So for the first time in history, we are not just observing this sun.

We are flying through its atmosphere. The structure that we see during a total solar eclipse, spark a solar eclipse, 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 for 60 years now. How hot was it? That environment is extremely hot. The temperature of the gas is in the multimillion degrees hot. But parka 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.

How big of a deal are these images that you captured? This is something fascinating. You go back for decades. We have been observing our star of 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. What are the pictures telling us that we didn't know before? So in addition to these small details about the solar wind flows in general, we also have this multiple CMEs that are racing one after the other. What's a CME? CME's coronal mass injection is 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. May 24. A coronal mass ejection. Is that the same as a solar flare? Solar flares usually 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. Okay, so tell me what you learned about these coronal mass ejections. So what we've seen in these few images we release 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 this dynamics in order for us to have a handle on space, weather in the future. NASA released a video made up of these images, and we'll have it on our website.

You can check it out at ScienceFriiday.com slash 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 sort of wispy, white, smoky feathers. And it looks sort of like it's all moving. Is that how you'd describe it? Yes. So in the images actually were released, you see a structure in the solar corona that we see during the 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 is negative, one is positive.

And what is fascinating within this theme layer, you see like basically a river of material that is flowing. The closest thing I can think of, if you have a river on top of it is carrying ice, that's in a way a very close description of what we see in this helisphoric 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 others. And this interaction is so important because from decades of observations, we learned that the, The events that drive strong geospays

storms are multiple CMEs, one after the others. Okay, so a storm is made of a bunch of coronal mass ejections. Yes. These are more potent. They will drive stronger storms on the Earth, on the Earth atmosphere here. If we have one after the other and after that. That's exactly what happened last year in May 2024.

Hmm. And so we didn't know how they interacted until we could see them with this probe? So we've seen hints of CME's kind of interacting before from previous observation from one AU which is around Earth. But there we didn't really have much details at all. It's the quality of the data is not as good as what we are getting with Puckas or 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 the 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 Parkasolor Trop. 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, you know, our textbooks obsolete? There are many, many things. And, you know, we launched Pakistaner Trob to learn about this big challenging phenomena that by the way, they are not unique to our star, the sun. We see them also on many, many other stars in the universe.

And what we are learning from PICA's 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 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's Rupup 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 in 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. We are getting surprised at every orbit that Parcassurrop is doing. It sounds like it must be just really boring for you. Quite boring, except that every three months we get a new load of data. And we are like, you know, this small kids excited about their birthdays.

We are also every three months we are waiting for a present from Parker Solar Probe. And Parkasolopo 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 Pakistan Europ. It is so loaded of physics, of new phenyloseph. It will take us decades to make sense of everything. And it's not, 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. Coming up after the break, will we ever have a solar weather forecast? And why nor thinks we should be working towards one. If we get one of those storms, the consequences are going to be quite quite, So there is an estimate out there that the economic losses will be in the trillions of dollars. You know, we've been talking about solar weather. And, you know, I've read pieces that really can go to the worst case scenario, right? Where, you know, not just sort of minor electrical interference on Earth, but that these solar, a perfect sunstorm could cause a worldwide blackout.

I'm curious as someone who studies this, like, where is that on your worry list? 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 current event of 1859. But tell me about that for people who don't know. The current event in 1859 is the strongest solar storm in all recorded history. So we're usually in typical, in normal times, we see aurora around the poles of the earth during nighttime. During that storm, Aurora was seen around the globe during the day.

Wow. Which is so fascinating. These are so, so powerful. So Aurora during the day, was there damage to? For example, the Telegraph caught fire, mini-station of Telegraph got 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 big.

So there is an estimate out there that the economic losses will be in the trillions of dollars. Wow. Okay, so you said you were of two opinions. What's the other? So the other opinion is the scientist in me says, you know what? Let this storm happen. And this is, 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. Can the Parker Solar Probe help us predict weather events like this? I think the ultimate goal is basically have the ability to predict space, weather like we do for Earth weather.

For space, we are probably several decades behind. 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 hits the Earth 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 on that environment. So basically what we will have, we will have like 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 big, big loss.

Let's zoom out just a tiny bit. I mean, what are some of the big mysteries about the sun, the things we still don't understand? 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. Really? 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 can 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. That seems useful? Absolutely. 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? You know, I probably 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, you know, an emotional and even further than that. If the sun, for example, is not out there for three, four days, we don't feel good. Let me give you just a small story about my seven years 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're 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. You know, 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, you know, and all that. It's profound. It is very profound. Nor, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you. It's really pleasure. Thank you so much. Dr. Norah Rwaffe is the Parker Solar Probe Project scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Today's episode was produced by Rasha Aredi. 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 Lickman.

Thanks for listening.