Eugene Parker
Eugene Newman Parker ( born June 10, 1927 in Houghton, Michigan) is an American astrophysicist.
Biography
Parker studied at Michigan State University ( BA 1948) and in 1951 received his doctorate at Caltech. After that, he was instructor at the University of Utah in 1953 and a research assistant of Walter Elsasser in Utah. In 1955 he became a research assistant to John A. Simpson at the University of Chicago. In 1957 he became assistant professor in 1962 and professor in the Physics Department and the Enrico Fermi Institute. In 1967 he moved to the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. In 1995, he went into retirement.
In 1967 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
His research mainly concern the solar wind, the magnetic fields of the earth and sun and their complex interactions. In 1956 he was one of the developers of Rekonnexions Theory, 1959, he was the English name solarwind introduced and proposed a magneto- hydrodynamic theory for the description of the solar wind.
Works
- Parker Conversations on electric and magnetic fields in the cosmos, Princeton University Press 2007
- Parker Interplanetary dynamic Processes, Interscience 1963
- Parker, EN: Cosmical Magnetic Fields: Their Origin and Their Activity. Oxford & NY: Clarendon Press, 1979
- Parker Spontaneous current sheets in magnetic fields: with applications to stellar x -rays, Oxford University Press 1994
- Parker, EN: Dynamics of the Interplanetary Gas and Magnetic Fields in: Ap.J. 128, 664-76 (1958).
- Parker, EN: The Hydrodynamic Theory of Solar Corpuscular Radiation and Stellar Winds in: Ap.J. 132, 821-66 ( 1960).