![]() Solar Orbiter’s main purpose is to help us achieve a better understanding of how the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere and why solar activity changes with time. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday. The mission is one of the most technologically advanced and recent assets in a series of large ground-based and space-based solar observatories, with the latter group including Skylab, Solar Maximum Mission, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, Parker Solar Probe, and others. Solar Orbiter, a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral on 10 February 2020. Now a new mission, Solar Orbiter, is set to advance our understanding further-in fact, it is already doing so. It is therefore not surprising that some of the most important missions of the space exploration era have focused on observing the Sun and the solar wind, the plasma flow that continuously expands from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, into the heliosphere. Another is turbulence (famously called by Richard Feynman the most important unsolved problem of classical physics), which contributes to the acceleration of particles in space and plays an important role in the dynamic and energetic processes of the solar environment. One such process, magnetic reconnection, involves the breaking and rejoining of oppositely directed magnetic field lines that occur during various phenomena, including CMEs, and can release tremendous amounts of energy. Studying how our Sun interacts with the surrounding region it influences, called the heliosphere, has further allowed us to investigate physical processes that are ubiquitous in the universe. These fields are responsible for violent, impulsive events on our star, such as flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which sometimes direct bursts of high-energy ionized particles, or plasmas, toward our planet. Indeed, generations of scientists, since Galileo Galilei in the 16th and 17th centuries and even before, have used observations of the Sun to investigate a large variety of astrophysical phenomena, from the formation of stars to the origins of stars’ self-sustained magnetic fields. It is also the only star we have direct access to by means of robotic probes-or by the observations of our own eyes. It is the most important celestial body, both sustaining life on Earth and posing persistent hazards in the form of damaging radiation. Yet to us, the Sun is not simply one of many stars. ![]() ![]() The Sun is one of billions of stars forming the Milky Way, which is, in turn, one of the billions of galaxies populating the universe. ![]()
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