Eugene Parker

Eugene Parker

Eugene Newman Parker (June 10, 1927 – March 15, 2022) was an American solar physicist and plasma physicist. 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 that the solar corona might be heated by myriad tiny "nanoflares", miniature brightenings resembling solar flares that would occur all over the surface of the Sun; this is a leading candidate to explain the coronal heating problem.Parker obtained his PhD from Caltech and spent four years as a postdoc at the University of Utah. He joined University of Chicago in 1955 and spent the rest of his career there, holding positions in the physics department, the astronomy and astrophysics department, and the Enrico Fermi Institute. Parker was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1967. In 2017, NASA named its Parker Solar Probe in his honor, the first time NASA had named a spacecraft after a living person.

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