How the Universe Works

There's a violent star at the center

of our solar system.

The immense power, the roiling, boiling surface,

the massive plumes.

It's ridiculous.

And our planet is at its mercy.

There are explosions and big giant eruptions of plasma

that head straight to Earth.

We have to understand these better to protect ourselves.

The Sun is a churning cauldron of nuclear reactions.

Revealing its inner workings was once mission impossible.

But not anymore.

We've recruited this network of spies, if you will.

We've built a fleet of spacecraft that

monitor the Sun 24 hours a day.

With the Sun under close surveillance,

we just might have what it takes to defend our planet.

September 6, 2017.

A flash of ultraviolet and X-ray light erupts from the Sun,

sending a burst of radiation toward Earth.

We call it a solar flare.

Flares are huge explosions on the surface of the Sun,

throwing light out into the solar system

and absolutely baking anything in its path.

These are really powerful events erupting from the Sun.

And we are fundamentally in the line of fire.

The flare up is so intense it

causes radio blackouts across the side

of the Earth facing the Sun.

And the timing could not have been worse.

The problem was at this time, there

were hurricanes in the Atlantic bearing down on the Caribbean.

And there were people trying to get in there and rescue folks.

Radio communication between disaster relief teams

goes down for most of the day.

Space weather and Earth weather combined to create chaos.

It's not just an academic exercise.

Your very lifestyle depends on understanding

how the Sun behaves.

We need to be able to predict what

the Sun is going to do next.

And in order to do that, we need to have eyes on the Sun,

as many eyes as we can get.

3, 2, 1.

That's why NASA has put together an elite unit.

We have ignition.

And we have liftoff.

Liftoff.

And liftoff.

On an international mission of the solar physics.

A fleet of daring spacecraft.

We humans have come a long way.

If you go back a few thousand years,

people were worshipping the Sun.

And today, we've built a fleet of spacecraft

that monitor the Sun 24 hours a day,

observing it from every angle, predicting

what it's going to do next.

That's nuts.

Leading the pack is the Solar

Dynamics Observatory, or SDO.

It keeps a telescopic eye on flares blasting

out from the Sun's surface.

24 hours a day, the probe is on the lookout.

It's constantly vigilant.

It looks at the Sun and a lot

of different wavelengths in exquisite detail

so that we can see exactly what sort of high-energy events

are happening on the Sun.

The record for the longest service

goes to SOHO, our sentinel monitoring the Sun

and its faint outer atmosphere.

The Solar and Heliosphere

Observatory, or SOHO, is the old hand at studying the Sun.

It's been up there for 25 years observing,

not just the Sun itself, but the environment around it.

Instead of looking directly at it,

it actually blocks out most of the lights

that we can see all these beautiful structures

that surround the Sun.

And then there's the new recruit...

The Parker Solar Probe.

Our scout going deep behind enemy lines.

The Parker Solar Probe

is going to give us the closest look at the Sun

that we have ever had in the history of humanity.

We're flying so close to the Sun,

we're flying through the gases of its atmosphere.

29 other craft make up the fleet,

each with their own role to play.

This fleet of spacecraft

that we have, the overall mission is to observe the Sun

scientifically, learn about its behavior, but also importantly,

to learn about the effects that it has on Earth.

Our look-out probe, the Solar

Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, spots something hellish.

Today's forecast for the Sun

is predicted to be 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit with winds

of up to 600 miles per second.

And a pretty decent chance of rain.

You don't want to be in this rainstorm

because your umbrella isn't going to help you.

Solar rain isn't water.

It's plasma.

Hot plasma.

Rather than a solid, liquid, or gas,

the entire Sun is made up of a strange fourth state of matter.

Plasma.

Plasma is just simply gas that's very hot.

So hot it's lost some of its electrons

and become electrically charged.

And the wonderful thing about plasma

is that once it has that electric charge,

you can direct it with a magnetic field.

And the Sun has the most powerful magnetic field

in the solar system.

It twists and flows through the entire star.

The Sun's magnetic field

is incredibly complicated.

There are lots of loops of magnetic lines coming

out of the Sun's surface.

As you go above the surface,

the magnetic field begins to control where the gas can go,

and you get these beautiful loops and other structures

above the Sun that are just showing you

where the magnetic field is.

The SDO spacecraft's jaw-dropping videos

of rain on the Sun show plasma flowing along

huge looping magnetic field lines that have punched

through the Sun's surface.

Because the surface of the Sun is a plasma,

and these loops of magnetic fields are coming out of it,

it draws that plasma up which then cools and rains

down as a plasma rain.

Tracking these loops of magnetic field

and plasma could help explain solar flares.

And it could give us some warning.

September 2017.

Minutes before the devastating mid-hurricane radio blackout,

our solar lookouts spotted an explosion

on the surface of the Sun.

Suddenly you have this tremendous flow of energy

and an explosive release of it.

And we call this a solar flare.

This is SDO's specialty of observation.

The craft tracked the magnetic loops

above the Sun's surface.

They were highly unstable.

SDO takes very detailed pictures

of where the flows are.

You can actually see gas flowing from one place.

You can see the magnetic loops.

This magnetic flux loops are kind of like wires

carrying electricity.

When they're on their own they're fine.

But if they get too close, they can connect and short circuit.

And then you get a tremendous release of energy.

The Ghostbusters were really on to something.

Don't cross the streams.

The contact between magnetic loops released an epic

explosion of high-energy light.

This radiation altered our planet's atmosphere.

Radio waves jammed, causing blackouts

at the worst possible moment.

Solar flares are happening on the Sun

90 million miles away.

Who cares, right?

Well, think of it this way.

A really good solar flare could be

the equivalent of, oh, say 10 million

hydrogen bonds going off.

How's that sound?

Solar flares happen a lot.

And they do affect us.

They have affected us in the past.

And they will again in the future.

But the Sun's twisting magnetic fields

do more than just disrupt our communications.

And when we see flares, we've got

to keep an eye out on those.

But sometimes, there's something even bigger.

The Sun launches huge clouds of plasma

across the solar system.

All of that material can

come to the Earth and really mess things up here...

Blow out our power grid, destroy our satellites, even physically

harm our astronauts in orbit.

Can the solar fleet safeguard Earth?

November 5, 2018.

An explosive cloud of plasma hits

the Parker Solar Probe as it orbits just

15 million miles from the Sun.

We have this fleet of spacecraft

out there viewing the Sun.

And they are also under attack by the Sun.

There are explosions coming from its surface.

Is not just light, but explosions of hot plasma.

And the Parker Solar Probe got blasted.

And yet it survived.

A huge blast of high-energy