NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew in and out of the solar corona and found a source of high-energy particles that no existing model had predicted

NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew in and out of the solar corona and found a source of high-energy particles that no existing model had predicted

When NASA’s Parker Solar Probe passed through the solar corona during perihelion encounters at the heliospheric current sheet, its instruments recorded energetic protons at energies far above what existing models of particle acceleration at that location could account for. A team led by Mihir Desai at the Southwest Research Institute, with James Drake, Marc Swisdak, and Zhiyu Yin from the University of Maryland’s Institute for Research in Electr…