Nothing humanmade can survive flying close to the Sun
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtThe Sun's surface is thousands of degrees, and its corona is hotter still. Any spacecraft that ventured near it would be destroyed, so our star can only ever be studied from a safe distance.
NowOn 24 December 2024, NASA's Parker Solar Probe passed just 3.8 million miles from the Sun's surface (flying through the corona at about 430,000 mph, the closest and fastest any human-made object has ever come to a star) and radioed home days later, intact.
What actually happened
The trick is not that nothing gets hot, but that the corona is extremely tenuous: it is scorchingly high in temperature yet so thin that relatively little heat actually transfers to the probe's heat shield, which faces the Sun and keeps the instruments behind it near room temperature.
This is 'updated' rather than a myth busted from scratch; Parker first grazed the corona back in 2021, and the Sun's outer atmosphere is genuinely lethal to anything unshielded. What the 2024 flyby moved is the record and the flat intuition behind it: a spacecraft flew straight through the outer atmosphere of the Sun, at record proximity and speed, and survived to report it.
Newsletter
Get new weekly revisions
Sources
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2024, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2024 learned the earlier version.