Parker Solar Probe has flown through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, where temperatures soar into the millions of degrees even though the visible surface below is far cooler — one of the strangest long-running puzzles in solar physics.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has spent the past few years flying repeatedly through the Sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere where temperatures run to more than a million degrees Celsius while the visible surface below sits at about 5,500. On 24 December 2024 it came within 6.1 million kilometres (3.8 million miles) of that surface, the [...] The post Parker Solar Probe has flown through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, where temperatures soar into the millions of degrees even though the visib