Researchers described the first published findings from the Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft launched in 2018 to journey closer to the sun than any other human made object. The findings, offering fresh details about how the sun spawns space weather, are reshaping astronomers' understanding of violent solar wind. One of the probe's “really big surprises,” according to one of the researchers, was the detection of sudden, abrupt spikes in the speed of the solar wind that were so violent that the magnetic field flips itself around, a phenomenon called “switchbacks.”