The Parker Solar Probe is dipping towards the sun, less than 10 million kilometers from it, closer than anything else built by humans. And this week they announced that the scientific data coming back shows that the spacecraft ‘touched the sun’.
That’s actually a pretty good metaphor to describe the transition from the region of the solar system where the solar wind flows freely into a region where the solar magnetic fields dominate the plasma’s motion in the solar Corona.
So let’s try and explain the visible layers of the sun and why they appear different and distinct to each other.
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