Solar Physicist Eugene Newman Parker Passes Away

• 21 Mar 2022

• American Astrophysicist Eugene Newman Parker, who contributed to solar physics, has passed away on 15 March 2022.
• In the 1950s he proposed the existence of the solar wind and that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral, predictions that were later confirmed by spacecraft measurements. In 1987, Parker proposed the existence of nanoflares, a leading candidate to explain the coronal heating problem.
• In 2017, NASA named its Parker Solar Probe in his honor, the first time NASA had named a spacecraft after a living person.