See it: Closest image of Sun yet taken by NASA's Parker Solar Probe

NASA's Parker Solar Probe captures moment of coronal mass ejection

FILE VIDEO: This video is from Sept. 5, 2022 and is a composite collected by the Wide Field Imager for NASA's Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument onboard, which captured the eruption of a coronal mass ejection. The CME's explosion becomes visible starting around 14 seconds into the video. The Sun is depicted off to the left in the video. (Courtesy: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL)

Last year, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made its record-breaking flyby of the Sun, zooming just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, and we’re just now seeing some results from that close brush with our star.

This week, NASA released new images taken by the spacecraft from the record-breaking close approach of the Sun, including from an instrument called WISPER. As Parker skimmed through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona, it used the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) to observe the corona and solar wind.

NASA’S PARKER SOLAR PROBE MAKES HISTORIC CHRISTMAS EVE FLIGHT THROUGH SUN'S ATMOSPHERE

The video below was created with images from WISPR, which shows solar wind in never-before-seen detail. According to NASA, this close-up shows what happens right after solar wind comes blasting out from the corona. It also shows multiple collisions of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, the space weather phenomena most known for creating aurora lights on Earth. 

Parker Solar Probe records solar wind racing from the Sun

Video made from Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument show solar wind from the corona taken during a record-breaking close flyby in December 2024. (Video credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab)

This data could be key to understanding space weather, according to Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR instrument scientist with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. 

NASA said as CMEs collide, their trajectory can change, making space weather forecasting more difficult to predict if these charged particles are headed for Earth. 

Still, scientists do not know how solar wind is created.

Illustration of Parker Solar Probe circling the Sun.

(JHUAPL / NASA)

"The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the Sun’s immense gravitational pull?" said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge, especially given the diversity in the properties of these streams — but with Parker Solar Probe, we’re closer than ever to uncovering their origins and how they evolve." 

Parker Solar Probe was named after the heliophysist Eugene Parker, who first theorized this concept in 1958. Parker was at the launch of the spacecraft with his namesake in 2018. He passed away at 94-years-old in 2022. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-mourns-passing-of-visionary-heliophysicist-eugene-parker/