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Researchers from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder are diving into the dusty environment that surrounds the sun a search that could help to reveal how planets like Earth come into being.
The pursuit comes by way of NASA s Parker Solar Probe, a pioneering mission that has taken scientists closer to Earth s home star than any spacecraft to date. Over two years, the probe has circled the sun six times, hitting maximum speeds of roughly 290,000 miles per hour.
In the process, the Parker team has learned a lot about the microscopic grains of dust that lie just beyond the sun s atmosphere, said David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at LASP. In new research, for example, he and his colleagues discovered that the densities of these bits of rock and ice seem to vary wildly over the span of months not something scientists were expecting.