NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Is Named for Him. 60 Years Ago, No One Believed His Ideas About the Sun #MakerEducation

Awesome piece on Dr. Eugene N. Parker from The New York Times.

It was 1958. Sputnik had launched only a year earlier, the first human-made object to circle the planet. But the beach ball-size spacecraft had no instruments to measure anything in space.

The study of what was up there was largely limited to what scientists could observe from the ground. It certainly looked like the vast expanses between planets were empty. And that is what most scientists believed.

But not Eugene N. Parker, then a 31-year-old, no-name professor at the University of Chicago. In a foundational paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Parker described how charged particles streamed continuously from the sun, like the flow of water spreading outward from a circular fountain.

Read more.

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