Eugene Parker

Born on 10 June 1927 in Houghton, Michigan, Eugene Parker is an astrophysicist who predicted the existence of the solar wind. Parker received a BS in physics from Michigan State University in 1948 and a PhD from Caltech in 1951. He then taught at the University of Utah, until accepting a position at the University of Chicago in 1955. Parker began his investigation into the possibility of a solar wind because of the observations of comets and their tails, which always pointed away from the Sun. His mathematical calculations led to his proposing that a stream of high-energy charged particles originates in the Sun’s upper atmosphere and flows at supersonic speeds throughout the solar system and beyond. The paper he submitted to the Astrophysical Journal was initially rejected. Parker appealed to the journal’s editor, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar , who overruled the reviewers and published the paper in 1958. Parker’s theory was validated four years later by measurements taken by the Mariner 2 probe on its way to Venus. Sixty years later, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe , the first NASA spacecraft to be named for a living person. Over his career, Parker studied other phenomena, such as cosmic rays and the magnetic fields of galaxies. Such terms as the Parker instability, the Parker equation, and the Parker limit attest to his contributions to the field . In recognition of his work, he received numerous awards and honors, including the 1978 George Ellery Hale Prize, the 1989 National Medal of Science, the 1992 Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal, the 1997 Bruce Medal, the 2003 Kyoto Prize, and the 2003 James Clerk Maxwell Prize. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 10 June 1927