Eugene Parker

Eugene Newman "Gene" Parker (June 10, 1927 – March 15, 2022) was an American solar and plasma physicist, often called the "father" and "founder" of heliophysics. In 1958 he proposed the existence of the solar wind and predicted that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral—predictions initially rejected by reviewers and scientific community, but quickly confirmed by the Mariner 2 spacecraft in 1962. Multiple phenomena in solar and plasma physics bear his name, including the Parker instability, Parker equation, Sweet–Parker model of magnetic reconnection, Parker limit on magnetic monopoles, and Parker theorem. In 1988, he proposed that nanoflares could explain the coronal heating problem, a theory that remains a leading candidate.

Parker obtained his PhD from Caltech in 1951 and spent four years at the University of Utah before joining the University of Chicago in 1955, where he spent the rest of his career at the Enrico Fermi Institute. He wrote more than 400 papers, mostly without co-authors, and received multiple awards including the National Medal of Science (1989), Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1992), Kyoto Prize (2003), and Crafoord Prize (2020). In 2017, NASA renamed its Solar Probe Plus mission to Parker Solar Probe in his honor, the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. Provided by Wikipedia