This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm your host,

Patty Boyd. And I'm Jacob Pinner. In this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. We're shining a light on the

sun with a mini-series all about our neighborhood star. This is episode number five.

Today's story starts with an astrophysicist named Nor Rawafi. First of all, when you tell people

I do space physics and astrophysics, they say, yeah, you guys are the smartest people on Earth.

Nor is the project scientist for NASA's Parker Solar Probe.

He's based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Well, you know what?

Probably we are not.

Everybody is smart on their own way,

but probably what we have is passion and curiosity

that we want to know things out there.

Nor's passion for space started when he was a kid.

He was born in Tunisia, in the countryside,

and he remembers summer nights when he would lay on his back

and look up into clear, starry skies.

I asked my father one day, why the sun is so hot.

And he told me, well, it's a ball of fire.

But I asked another question, and I asked it multiple times, but nobody can answer it to me.

And that question was, how comes this fire never goes out?

And, you know, now that you're a real-life astrophysicist, do you know the answer? Well, I know more about the sun.

But if you ask me honestly, what keeps me interested in it is the things we don't know, and there

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