Solar physics giant, Eugene Parker is the first scientist to have theorized the existence of solar winds. It was 94 years old.
Le Monde with AFP
The American Astrophysicist Eugene Parker, Sun Specialist and the theorized the existence of solar winds, died at the age of 94, announced NASA Wednesday, March 16th.
Born in 1927, Eugene Parker was a giant of solar physics, to the point that NASA decided to give its name to its part on mission in August 2018 towards the sun, a tribute she had until then never gone to a living investigator. “Gene Parker was a legendary figure of our discipline,” greeted Angela Olinto, the Dean of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Chicago, his mother house, who says he died on Tuesday.
Decorated with multiple times
“His vision of the sun and solar system was well ahead of his time,” she added. A reference to its publication, submitted in 1958, describing for the first time, using extensive calculations, the phenomenon of solar winds – a constant flow of electrically loaded particles that escapes from our star and filled the whole solar system . An initial discovery rejected.
“The first reperforing of my article said” good, I think he should go to the library and plunge into this subject before writing an article on that, because [his publication] is a no Total “”, “he said in 2018.
It was necessary that the director of Astrophysical Journal, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, future Nobel Prize, confirms his calculations to validate the publication. His conclusions will then be confirmed in 1962 with the direct observations of a NASA probe. Scientists now know that solar winds brooms all the planets of the solar system, protecting them with dangerous radiation and sometimes disrupting the communications on Earth.
It was also at the origin of the idea of the small explosions on the sun which would explain that the solar crown be warmer than the surface of the star itself.
Decorated with multiple occasions, he was a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Parker probe, launched in 2018, has approached the sun as no spacecraft previously, transmitting to researchers a number of data originally from many discoveries, on the space weather in particular.