How the Solar Eclipse Could Help Us Solve a Mystery About the Sun

You’ve been drawing the sun’s corona ever since you were in pre-K — and that’s probably the last time it made any sense. The sun is the 865,000-mile ball of gas that was the scribbly yellow circle in your drawing. The corona is the veil of luminous plasma streaming millions of miles into space, where you drew straight yellow rays. Things were never so simple again. Studying the mysteries of the corona is not easy, for the same reason that looking at the sun itself isn’t easy: the brilliance of the solar fires washes out everything else. Coronagraphs — black masks fitted in telescopes and other observing instruments — can cover up the solar disk and allow astronomers to focus just on the plasma. But diffraction of the incoming light makes the pictures imperfect. It is only during a total eclipse, when the moon itself acts as the greatest coronagraph of all, that a truly good look at the corona becomes possible. That’s exactly what will happen on August 21, when the event that is being called The Great American Eclipse tracks across the U.S. in a path of totality that will run from western Oregon to eastern South Carolina, traveling from coast to coast in just over 90 minutes. Those will be 90 minutes that scientists from NASA, the University of Hawaii, the Southwest Research Institute, and multiple other labs and universities plan to spend well, scrutinizing the corona until the moon passes by and the sun once again forbids such...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized corona eclipse space space 2017 sun The Great American Eclipse Source Type: news