Eugene Parker, a pioneering American astrophysicist whose mathematical prediction that charged particles streamed from stars in a solar wind was met with disbelief before he was ultimately vindicated, has died aged 94, NASA said on Wednesday.
Parker was hailed as a visionary who laid the groundwork for the field of heliophysics, the science of understanding the Sun and its interactions with Earth and the solar system, including space weather.
"We were saddened to learn the news that one of the great scientific minds and leaders of our time has passed," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a statement. Parker died Tuesday, according to the University of Chicago, his longtime academic home. He began studying the temperature of the Sun's corona, and his calculations showed the conditions should produce a supersonic flow of particles off the surface."The first reviewer on the paper said, 'Well, I would suggest that Parker go to the library and read up on the subject before he tries to write a paper about it, because this is utter nonsense,'" Parker told UChicago News in 2018.
Parker also proposed the idea of"nanoflares" – small solar explosions that occur all over the Sun – which are responsible for its superheated corona. The corona is hotter than the surface itself, a fact that couldn't be explained by known physics at the time.
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