How Close Can We Get To The Sun? - Science | HowStuffWorks

Extreme heat is the most obvious concern. The sun's surface temperature is a stifling 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit (5,726 degrees Celsius). Curiously though, the area that surrounds the sun is even hotter.

You know that halo of light that creeps out from behind the moon during a solar eclipse? That's the corona. A layer of blistering plasma, it represents the uppermost portion of the sun's atmosphere. The corona begins roughly 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) above the surface and extends far into space.

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Parts of it get hot. Very hot. In some places, the corona is liable to be 300 times hotter than the surface. No one knows why this is; NASA hopes that the Parker Solar Probe will find some clues.

That's where the Parker Solar Probe passed through on its eighth flyby of the sun April 28, 2021. The spacecraft dipped to just 14.97 solar radii (6.4 million miles) from the sun's surface through an area in the corona known as a pseudostreamer. These are massive structures that rise from the sun like ribbons. You can see them during a solar eclipse. The first flyby lasted about four hours and the Parker Solar Probe got as close as 3.83 million miles from the sun's surface.

"Flying so close to the sun, Parker Solar Probe now senses conditions in the corona that we never could before," Nour Raouafi, the Parker Solar Probe project scientist at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a press statement. "We see evidence of being in the corona from magnetic field data, solar wind data and visually in white-light images. We can actually see the spacecraft flying through coronal structures that can be observed from Earth during a total solar eclipse."

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