Stuff can escape, and the whole thing acts like one big gaseous outward wind. A small fraction of former JCOs reached orbits with aphelia inside Jupiter’s orbit, and some reached. but may give different collision probabilities with the Sun. Icarus (2000) by P Michel, V Zappalà, A Cellino, P Tanga Add To MetaCart. The sun’s atmosphere, the corona, is not tightly bound. Estimated Abundance of Atens and Asteroids Evolving on Orbits between Earth and Sun. One day in 1958, it occurred to me this was all very simple. Around the same time, astronomers were noting that comet tails always pointed away from the sun, and that, too, was very difficult to explain. “We knew cosmic rays were correlated with the sun’s magnetic activity, but the timing of the cosmic rays on our detectors during one particularly violent solar flare showed that the particles were moving very freely from sun to Earth. In 1956, Eugene Parker, a young postdoc at the University of Chicago, was investigating cosmic rays arriving at Earth from far off in the galaxy when an idea struck him. That was when we first grasped the power of solar storms on Earth. The interference caused polar auroras that could be seen as far south as the Caribbean and as far north as Auckland, New Zealand, and knocked out telegraphic systems. In 1859, a particularly violent solar flare-up coincided with a huge electromagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere. Every now and then its fiery surface turns explosive, sending matter, energy and magnetism whirling into the surrounding vacuum. The Parker Solar Probe being tested at the Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland