NASA is preparing to "touch the sun" next week with a probe that will fly within its atmosphere, called the corona, the website Space.com reported.
The probe will "revolutionize" their understanding of the sun by gathering information directly from the corona, the part of the atmosphere visible during an eclipse, NASA researchers said in a statement.
The Parker Solar Probe which is scheduled to take off no earlier that Aug. 6, will circle the sun 24 times within the corona, which is a million degrees, noted the website. Scientists hope the research will allow them to answer questions about star and other stars by proxy, according to Space.com.
"We need to go to the corona because we have done so much science by looking at the star," project scientist Nicola Fox, a solar scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said Friday at a NASA news conference.
"We've looked at it in every single different way you can imagine, every wavelength; we've traveled beyond the orbit of Mercury even. But we need to get into this action region and into the region where all of these mysteries are really occurring," Fox continued.
Scientists will be studying solar winds along with attempting to understand how heat moves through the sun's atmosphere, Space.com wrote. The corona can reach temperatures 300 times hotter than the sun's surface, for example.
"It's a very strange, unfamiliar environment for us," Alex Young, a solar scientist at NASA, said at the news conference, according to Space.com. "We're used to the idea that if I'm standing next to a campfire and I walk away from it, it gets cooler — but this is not what happens on the sun."
One theory astronomers have developed for why the corona is so hot is that rolling gas at the surface of the sun creates thunderous sounds, like waves crashing on a shore, possibly creating a supply of energy to heat it, The Guardian reported.
The newspaper said other theories suggested various other ways where the magnetic fields generated in the sun might connect to the corona and supply the energy.
"It's the kind of thing you'd think we would know by now, but we don't," Tim Horbury of Imperial College, London, a member of the Parker Solar Probe science team, told The Guardian.
After its launch, the probe will do a flyby of Venus in September before dropping by the sun. That is when scientists will start to hold their breath, where solar winds and particles – which can play havoc on digital instruments on Earth – will come into play, The Guardian said.
"There's a lot of risk here," Horbury told The Guardian about the probe, which will be in the most extreme conditions of any spaceship before it. "Obviously the people who built the spacecraft are extremely competent but however good you are, there is still risk in doing something this new. Our hearts are going to be in our mouths for a while until we see that everything is going to work OK."
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