Eugene Parker, American astrophysicist and academic (died 2022)

Eugene Newman Parker was an American solar and plasma physicist, often called the "father" and "founder" of heliophysics. In 1958, he proposed the existence of the solar wind and predicted that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral—predictions initially rejected by reviewers and scientific community, but quickly confirmed by the Mariner 2 spacecraft in 1962. Multiple phenomena in solar and plasma physics bear his name, including the Parker instability, Parker equation, Sweet–Parker model of magnetic reconnection, Parker limit on magnetic monopoles, and Parker theorem. In 1988, he proposed that nanoflares could explain the coronal heating problem, a theory that remains a leading candidate.