June 10, 1927: The birth of Eugene Parker

A group of people wearing white protective laboratory suits and hairnets stand in a brightly lit, high-ceilinged room. A woman in the center of the group points toward a large, complex piece of industrial machinery wrapped in shiny silver, gold, and red paneling. The spacious background features white walls, a large blue letter "E," and various ladders and equipment scattered across the gray floor.

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.

Elisa Neckar is senior production editor of Astronomy magazine, and the editor of the Today in the History of Astronomy feature on Astronomy.com.

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