Total Solar Eclipse 2017: What Scientists Can Learn from the Spectacular Blackout Josh Lowe - Newsweek | |
go to original August 17, 2017 |
How We Will React to the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse (The New Yorker)
Update: NASA Offers Advice on Safe Viewing of the Great American Eclipse (UPI)
For most Americans, the total solar eclipse on August 21 will be a piece of celestial entertainment. Impressive, even awe-inspiring, but perhaps also a welcome distraction from work, or something to bring the family together for a few brief minutes.
For scientists across the nation, however, the event will be an unmissable opportunity to learn about aspects of space and the sun they can’t study properly at any other time. Here are some of the experiments that will be taking place during the brief blackout.
“This is a region where all the action happens,” Alex Young, an Associate Director for Science at NASA, said in a video interview on the agency’s website. Studying the corona can help predict the behavior of solar winds, charged particles released by the sun, and “coronal mass ejections,” where it fires out a quick burst of solar material, both of which can affect the Earth and other planets.
These phenomena are known as space weather, and scientists would love to know more about them. But there’s a problem: when the sun is at its full brightness, it’s very hard to study the corona. The outer region of the corona is, “millions of times dimmer than the solar disk,” according to Young.
Astronomers can use instruments called coronagraphs, in which metal disks blot out the Sun. But these tools also obscure part of the lower corona to prevent light from the main body of the sun diffracting around them and ruining the image.
So scientists are seizing this opportunity to take a look at the mysterious region. NASA is funding six experiments studying the corona during the eclipse, according to a statement.
Among them, a team led by Philip Judge of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, will observe the corona’s magnetic field structure with new instruments in the hope of gaining a better understanding of how the sun generates space weather.
Meanwhile, Shadia Habbal of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu wants to learn more about why the corona is much hotter than the surface of the sun—a counterintuitive fact, given that it is further away from the sun’s heat source.
Her team will image the sun from five sites across four states 600 miles apart, using spectrometers to analyze light emitted by different ionized elements in the corona, and selective filters to capture it using different colors. They hope the the data they gather will improve their understanding of how the corona is heated.
Read the rest at Newsweek
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