What’s happening to the dust?

Dust is everywhere in space. However, there is a dust-free zone close to the Sun, and it’s thought the temperatures up close obliterate it – but this has never been proven. Now the PSP has shown evidence that this is the case. Its Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) has observed dust thinning at a distance of just over 11 million kilometres (7 million miles) from the Sun. The thinning effect continued to be observed as close as 6.4 million kilometres (4 million miles). “This dust-free zone was predicted decades ago, but has never been seen before,” says Russ Howard, principal investigator for the WISPR suite at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. “We are now seeing what’s happening to the dust near the Sun.”