Coronal Heating and Solar Wind Acceleration: What are We Learning from Parker Solar Probe?
When
Where
Dr. Anna Tenerani
Professor of Physics
University of Texas at Austin
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 and, more generally, in astrophysics. The NASA mission Parker Solar Probe was launched in 2018 with the objective of finding answers to these questions by gathering fields and particle data at distances closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft. In this lecture, I will present some results from Parker Solar Probe and discuss emerging perspectives on the role of waves and turbulence in solar wind dynamics.