During its two encounters, Parker traveled within 15 million miles of the Sun’s surface, far surpassing the 25-million-mile record first set by NASA’s Helios 2 mission in 1976. Parker has also claimed the title of the fastest human-made object in history from Helios 2, as it surfed near the Sun at over 153,000 miles per hour. [...]
“To our big surprise,” Kasper said, “by the time we got to our closest approach, [the solar wind] was flowing between 35 and 50 kilometers per second around the Sun. That’s something like 15 to 25 times faster than the standard solar models predict, so we’re missing something really fundamental in our standard models of the Sun—how it rotates and how the wind escapes—and that’s really interesting.” [...]
Though the mechanism behind these waves is still unknown, the sheer force of them may help explain two of the most persistent mysteries about the Sun: Why is solar corona, or the atmosphere of the Sun, about 1,000 times hotter than its surface? And why does the solar wind suddenly accelerate to supersonic speeds at a certain distance from the Sun?
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