Studies of Our Sun Connected to my Early Career and Personal Failings

Warning: this story gets into my early research career, which focuses on the sun. If this seems a boring topic, and you just can’t get into it, jump to the last section titled Oral Roberts University. This has a story about my little dog Bindi and how she came to teach a class in Intro Physics. Its a hoot.

The Parker Solar Probe is a satellite that was designed to touch the sun. Its instruments are heavily insulated because the sun is so hot, but on Christmas Eve 2024 the probe took a dive closer to the sun than its previous trips. Because of the heat, the spacecraft went incognito for a few worrying days, before radio communication was re-established at NASA as the probe gained height once again.

What is the mission of the spacecraft?
It is to make measurements of plasma and magnetic fields in the corona – the outer layers of the sun – which is what you see during an eclipse. The corona is much hotter than the sun’s surface, called the photosphere, and this has not been explained. The best bet is plasma waves travel outward and deposit their energy farther out, like ocean waves crashing on a beach.

Note: a plasma is a rarified, superheated volume of gas where electrons and protons can move independently, but are strongly affected by any magnetic field that is present. Its called the fourth state of matter.

A second mission is to understand the origin of the continuous solar wind that blows radially outward from the sun’s surface and reaches earth in a few days, but then continues on for more than ten times the radius of earth’s orbit. It’s quite different from the wind we know. Its speed is 400 km/sec or 250 miles/sec, but you wouldn’t feel it on your face because its density is so low that its much like a vacuum created here on earth. The solar wind consists of low-energy charged particles: protons and electrons.

A third mission is to capture measurements of singular high-energy activity at the sun: solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and cosmic rays that are accelerated at the surface of the sun.

Where does the Parker name come from?
Eugene Parker worked in the university of Chicago, a hotbed of space research, and developed a theory of the solar wind. As a plasma, the solar wind would carry the sun’s magnetic field outwards. Because the sun rotates on its own axis, the magnetic field in space would take the shape of spirals like a garden sprinkler system that rotates (Figure 3).

Solar cosmic rays.
My PhD supervisor at Adelaide University was Ken McCracken, from Tasmania. While in the US, McCracken had actually verified the Parker spirals in Figure 3 from a study of cosmic rays from the galaxy that traveled all the way to earth. When he returned to Adelaide, I was able to study new cosmic ray data he had brought with him from a NASA satellite called Imp-F. The satellite rotated in orbit around the earth while collecting and counting energetic cosmic ray protons and electrons ejected from a solar flare on the west side of the sun.

In general, individual solar cosmic rays are tied to a spiral magnetic line in Figure 3. Look at the spiral that passes close to the earth — it originates on the western side of the sun. Since big solar flares can produce high intensities of cosmic rays, space walkers on the moon in the Apollo project had to be aware of the sun’s weather on the western side.

After a solar flare, the first particles arrived at earth in about 10-12 minutes by zooming along a spiral magnetic line to earth without too many obstructions. Then, for several hours the cosmic ray intensity at earth would increase to a peak, before declining over many hours or days. Overall, it appeared to be a diffusive process, where kinks in the magnetic field spirals scattered the cosmic rays, so that some oscillated back and forth along a magnetic field line before eventually reaching earth. It’s like pulling the cork on a bottle of perfume in a corner of a room — it takes a while but eventually the molecules of perfume spread to an observer in another corner.

First career failing.
At the same time, these charged particles drifted sideways to maintain their identity with the spiral magnetic field line. I thought about this during my PhD, and concluded that after much scattering, the bulk movement of cosmic rays was reduced to a radial outwards direction with a bulk speed that was the same as the speed of the solar wind. The name for this movement is convection.

Instinctively I felt this was a new discovery, so I wrote up my analysis in a paper for presentation in Tasmania, and left it on the desk of my supervisor to read. He was extremely busy, and didn’t get back with me. I presented the paper in Tasmania, but nobody picked up on my convection discovery.

Some months later, a young woman in the US presented a more formal paper with the same analysis and conclusion. I was disappointed, actually mad, because I felt I’d missed an opportunity to get some recognition in the research world. I made a decision right then to focus on other opportunities to publish results and to work hard to make this happen. Publishing papers in the research community became a lifelong goal.

Be independent but not isolated.
My first job after the PhD was in a government lab in Sydney. The group I joined were interested in how low-energy particles were accelerated to high energies to become solar cosmic ray protons and electrons. Two of the lab scientists had just written a paper arguing that ambient particles in a loop of magnetic field close to the sun could be accelerated to high energies while they were trapped in the loop. I pointed out that Parker himself had published that this was not possible. They were surprised, but found a way to adapt the paper and it was published.

I was more interested in coronal mass ejections, which I’ve written on before, because these were usually preceded by a strong shock wave (blast wave) that spread from the sun though interplanetary space. If the shock wave hit the earth, it and the mass ejection of material from the sun that followed could degrade radio communications on aircraft and other electronic facilities on earth. The shock wave could also be seen spreading around the sun’s surface by looking at radio data from the lab in Sydney. This was a key part of the story, and was a worthwhile project in my view.

Although it was suggested from time to time that I study acceleration of solar cosmic rays, I couldn’t see what I could do. I was insecure about this, and so I isolated myself to the shock wave studies. As a result, my one-year contract wasn’t extended. But meanwhile I received a job offer from a big national lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

My PhD had taught me to be an independent thinker, which was a good asset. But I didn’t learn to communicate with bosses and co-workers to gain from their different perspectives, or to gain visibility which is so important in a research field. But its more than this. Synergy means when two people combine their ideas, the result is greater than each one could produce separately (to say this another way, one plus one equals three). Self-imposed isolation was my second career failing.

Los Alamos.
I was in the Space Sciences Division of the national lab, appointed to analyze cosmic rays from the sun, which I had been doing since my PhD. The cosmic rays in Los Alamos were captured by detectors in a Vela satellite that the US air force put up in the sky to detect radiation — to make sure Russia didn’t explode any new bombs above ground.

The detectors scanned the plane the planets circled in, but also looked at 45 degrees up from that, and 45 degrees below. So it was a 3-dimensional picture of incoming cosmic rays, and this hadn’t been done before. I wrestled with how to simplify the data, and was at a loss until I talked with a friendly scientist from back east who suggested spherical harmonics. I’d never heard the term, but he explained how the data could be sorted into a mean cosmic ray intensity, plus a unidirectional component (a one-way streaming flow of particles) plus a bidirectional component (a two-way streaming flow of particles).

I took his idea and diligently manipulated the equations of spherical harmonics to apply to the raw data, and it worked. I could now see at a glance when there were periods of one-way flow, or two-way flow which was a great asset.

The one-way flow I understood from my PhD studies. The two-way flow was intriguing because a two-way flow had been seen in solar wind particles captured by a separate detector on the same Vela satellite. The presenter, also a scientist from Los Alamos, said that he was certain this data was evidence for a large magnetic loop.

The interpretation was a large loop of magnetic field that originated at the sun and then were carried all the way to earth by a coronal mass ejection event. I was able to confirm two-way flows in the cosmic ray data that supported the case of magnetic field loops existing near the earth. This has since been confirmed by other investigators in the years since 1972.

However, I made a public mistake. When presenting a paper on bidirectional streaming flow of electrons, based on Vela data, a listener pointed out that the bidirectional flow could be caused by electrons being reflected by the stronger magnetic field of the earth. I had not ruled this out, hadn’t even thought of it to be honest. I was exposed in an influential meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The embarrassment still stings when I think about it.

Although I had learned the benefit of cross-pollinating ideas and synergistic sharing with other experts, I must not have shared my findings in this paper with someone who had enough experience to know that there was an alternative explanation for the bidirectional data. This was a career failing that lowered my research reputation.

Oral Roberts University.
I couldn’t stay in Los Alamos because I was an Australian citizen and I wasn’t prepared to give this up. I accepted a faculty position at a small religious university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Oral Roberts University. It was largely a teaching institution, but my mind wanted to continue research. I obtained funding from the US government to analyze cosmic ray data from Los Alamos.

During this time I taught introductory physics, but found the presentation of equations and their application to be boring – to me and the students. I read a new book about the two sides of the brain, and realized I was a bit one-dimensional on the left side, the analytical, methodical, step-by-step study of details. My spirit was awakened as I came to understand the right side of the brain, characterized by the intuitive, big picture, pattern-recognition, holistic synthesis of things.

I decided to apply a new approach based on teaching the right side of the brain first, then the left side. This made a big difference compared to my previous left-only basis. An example is best to appreciate this. I brought my little chihuahua, Bindi, into the class to teach about speed and acceleration. I lined the students up along the hallway, and charged them to observe the puppy and identify speed changes and periods of acceleration and deceleration.

I gave Bindi a whiff of the cheese in my hand and told her to sit at one end of the hallway. Bindi knew about cheese. She would stay when I said “sit”, then when she heard the magic word “okay” she could come get the cheese. When she heard “okay” from me at the other end of the hallway, Bindi’s feet slipped and slid on the polished linoleum as she accelerated towards me and the cheese. As the cheese came into view, Bindi decelerated slipping and sliding again until she grabbed the cheese from my hand. The students clapped and cheered. We did it once more, then retreated to the classroom. End of the right-brain lesson.

Now for the left-brain lesson. I asked the students to write down the periods of changing speed, acceleration, and deceleration. This led to estimates of the puppy’s speed and how much it changed. Then to a definition of acceleration in terms of speed changes. Did the students understand acceleration? You bet they did, and they enjoyed every minute of the lesson. Ten years later, a student come up and told me that Intro Physics was his favorite class, and the puppy demonstration was his most memorable lesson.

The approach of using two sides of the brain was not a career failure, but was a big success, and it boosted creativity in my research as well as in the classroom. In the ensuing years, I became interested in the oil and gas industry, which was big in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I built from scratch a model of the fracking process, which was a huge challenge for a space physicist. Later, I joined Amoco in 1986 and went to work in research on coalbed methane, when the failings from earlier years became strengths. But that’s another story…
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I stand between the years,
The light of my presence is flung across the year to come –
The radiance of the sun of righteousness,
Backward, over the past year, is my shadow thrown,
Hiding trouble and sorrow and disappointment.
[From God Calling, 1/1/2000]
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