The American astrophysicist Eugene Parker, specialist in the Sun and first to have theorized the existence of solar winds, died at the age of 94, announced, Wednesday March 16, NASA, the federal agency in charge of the space program United States civilian.
Born in 1927, Eugene Parker was a giant in solar physics, so much so that NASA decided to give his name to its probe left on a mission in August 2018 to the Suna tribute that she had never before paid to a living researcher.
“Gene Parker was a legendary figure in our discipline”greeted Angela Olinto, the dean of the faculty of physics at the University of Chicago (Illinois), its parent company, who specifies that he died on Tuesday.
A discovery initially rejected
“His vision of the Sun and the Solar System was well ahead of its time”, she added. A reference to his publication, submitted in 1958, describing for the first time, with the help of advanced calculations, the phenomenon of solar winds – a constant stream of electrically charged particles which escape from our star and fill the entire Solar System . A discovery initially rejected.
“The first reviewer of my paper said, ‘Well, I think he should go to the library and dive into this before writing an article on it, because [sa publication] is total nonsense”he said in 2018.
The director of the’Astrophysical Journal, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, future Nobel Prize in Physics (1983), confirms his calculations to validate the publication. His conclusions were then confirmed in 1962 with direct observations from a NASA probe. Scientists now know that solar winds sweep across all planets in the Solar System, shielding them from dangerous radiation and sometimes disrupting communications on Earth.
Decorated multiple times
He was also at the origin of the idea of small explosions on our star which would explain that the solar corona is hotter than the surface of the star itself.
Decorated multiple times, he was professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Parker probe, launched in 2018, approached the Sun like no spacecraft before, transmitting to researchers a wealth of data at the origin of many discoveries, in particular on space weather.
