This is CBSI on the world. Behind the Black, Bob Zimmerman is here, and he's headed to my favorite star in the whole cosmos, the sun.

Bob, the sun is not understood, but we're mapping what we don't understand. Is that a good thing?

Yes, of course, it's a good thing. We're beginning to learn more

about the sun. Using multiple solar observatories in space, scientists have now mapped the

approximate location, and it fluctuates, of the outside edge of the sun's corona, or its atmosphere.

This is the point where the solar wind escapes the magnetic field,

the close magnetic field of the sun and begins to flow outward through the solar system.

And so I have on behind the black a whole sampling of images. They used not only five spacecraft located at the L1

point, a million miles from Earth, but they used a solar orbiter, which is orbiting the sun very

close, and the Parker Solar Probe, which is also orbiting the sun in a close orbit. And that gives

them a three-dimensional mapping of the data. And from that, they were

able to map out approximately where the edge of the corona is, where the edge of the atmosphere

is. And this is good data. It'll help them better understand the processes that are going on

on the sun. It still doesn't tell us any fundamentals,

but this is the kind of thing you must have that you're going to begin to understand those

fundamentals. And we go from the sun to way out at the edge of the solar system. The two planets

that are hard to remember when you're first memorizing the list of planet names in the third grade,

Neptune and Uranus.

And what we're looking at here is the possibility that they're not gas giants or somewhere in between gas giants and Rocky and West.

Yeah.

Initially, they were gas giants, then scientists started to call them ice giants,

saying that they're

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