The Beauty and Science of a Total Solar Eclipse

This story originally appeared in the TIME special edition Beautiful Phenomena available now at retail outlets and through the TIME shop and through Amazon The moon was not placed in space for our entertainment. In fact, it was placed there by accident, most astronomers believe, as the product of a nearly mortal blow the Earth sustained more than 4 billion years ago, when our planet was sideswiped by a Mars-size planetesimal speeding through local space. That collision produced a massive debris cloud that eventually coalesced into our moon. The sun didn’t pop into being for our enjoyment either; it spun down out of a cloud of primordial dust and gas, just as Earth itself did. Not much glamour or drama in all of that. Yet now and then, the debris ball that is the moon passes in front of the dust ball that is the sun and produces the glorious phenomenon we know as a solar eclipse. Even for scientists, there can be a temptation to see the eclipse as something intended to thrill, a sky show put on for the only species in the solar system able to appreciate it. Consider that the sun is about 400 times the diameter of the moon, which would make it awfully hard for the lunar disk to fit so perfectly over the solar one—except that the sun is also about 400 times more distant, meaning that the two bodies appear to be the same size in the earthly sky. Consider the way the moon’s ragged mountains, which are impossible to see from as far away as Earth, form a sawtooth ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized eclipse space space 2017 Source Type: news