Hi, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today on the show, The Sun, like we've never seen it before.

What Parker's Europe is telling us is opening our eyes on the physics that is happening.

Right there in the solar atmosphere that drives all this stuff we get here now.

In December, the Parker Solar Probe made history when it made the closest approach to the sun ever.

The spacecraft skimmed the sun's corona, its outer atmosphere. And as the Parker

Solar Probe whizzed by, a camera on board snapped a few images, showing us the sun's surface and the

supercharged particles beaming out of it in unprecedented detail. Here to answer our burning sun

questions is Dr. Nora Rwaffe, Parker Solar Probe,

project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

Nora, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Okay. How close did the Parker Solar Probe get to the sun?

The sun Earth distance on average is about 93 million miles.

Parker Solar Probe got within 3.8 million miles from the surface of the sun.

That sounds far, but I'm hearing that that is actually quite close.

So Parker Solar Probe got so close.

It's within 4% of the Sun-earth distance. If that distance was about

one yard, Parker's solar pope will be about an inch away from the sun. So for the first time in

history, we are not just observing this sun. We are flying through its atmosphere. The structure

that we see during a total solar eclipse, spark a solar eclipse, is flying through them, sampling

them, and teaching us about them for the first time in history. And that's something remarkable

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