Eugene Parker visits the solar probe that bears his name in the clean room where it was being built, in 2017. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL
Eugene Parker, pioneer of theoretical solar and plasma astrophysics, was born June 10, 1927. Parker revolutionized the field of heliophysics, notably by first proposing the existence of the solar wind — a stream of charged particles ejected from the Sun — in 1958. His theory was confirmed by Mariner II in 1962. Among many other achievements, he also predicted the spiral structure of the Sun’s magnetic field, and contributed to theories of coronal heating and the magnetic fields of galaxies and stars. In 2017, NASA renamed its Solar Probe Plus as the Parker Solar Probe in his honor, the first instance of a NASA space mission being named after a living individual. Parker passed away five years later, in 2022.
