Speaker: Anna Tenerani, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract: The solar corona is a magnetized plasma at temperatures above a million degrees expanding into interplanetary space through the solar wind, which fills our solar system by generating the heliosphere. Although decades of remote and in-situ observations have enabled significant progress in our understanding of the solar corona and solar wind dynamics, the mechanisms underlying coronal heating and solar wind acceleration remain a fundamental unanswered question in space plasma physics. The NASA mission Parker Solar Probe, launched in August 2018, aims to find answers to these questions by measuring fields and particles’ energy at distances closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft. In this seminar, I will discuss how Parker Solar Probe, by flying to within 10 solar radii from the sun’s surface, has provided unprecedented observations of the young solar wind by reshaping our understanding of coronal heating and solar wind formation, including the role of waves and turbulence in solar wind dynamics.