Scientists predict that a surprising coronavirus will appear during the solar eclipse

Scientists predict that a surprising coronavirus will appear during the solar eclipse

Megan Bartels &

This article is special report About the total solar eclipse that will be visible in parts of the United States, Mexico, and Canada on April 8, 2024.

Eclipse chasers have good reason to expect an especially spectacular sight on April 8, when the moon briefly passes in front of the sun.

But not everyone is happy to wait until the crucial moment to see what the sun will look like. A team of scientists is using supercomputers and very new data to predict the appearance of the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. This region is only revealed during a total solar eclipse, when the moon precisely blocks light from the sun’s visible surface, so scientists believe this exercise will help them understand how the sun’s magnetic field governs the star’s atmosphere. You can test your understanding of what to do.

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And these days, that magnetic field has become much more active, making it even more difficult for researchers to predict the view of the corona. “We knew working on this problem that the sun is very dynamic right now, near the solar maximum,” said Predictive Science President and Senior Research Scientist. says solar physicist John Rinker. He and his colleagues first attempted to model the corona during a solar eclipse in the mid-1990s. Although computational techniques and input data have advanced significantly, the fundamental physics reflected in the process have remained unchanged for 30 years.

This year, the team is taking on a new challenge. The idea is to continually update the forecast as new data comes in. Previously, Linker and his colleagues instead used magnetic field data collected about 10 days before the eclipse. However, this year’s simulation will run for approximately three weeks in total. The exercise was enlightening, he says. “We can already see that the corona we are predicting on the day of the eclipse is different from the corona we were predicting at the beginning of the calculations,” Linker says.

Linker and his colleagues have made predictions about both the magnetic field and the corona as seen from Earth during the eclipse. Although humans can’t see the magnetic field, eclipse viewers should expect to see a view of the corona that’s halfway between the two simulations, Linker said. This is because the human eye can see more detail and structure than the human eye can see in a total corona. In basic white light corona prediction. (Before and after totality, remember to wear eclipse glasses to protect your eyes when looking at the sun.)

Another useful feature on the team’s website shows what the sun will look like from any point along the path of totality. As seen from different locations on Earth, the sun’s orientation changes, creating an almost 90-degree rotation between western Mexico, where the moon’s shadow first lands, and eastern Canada, where totality is the last visible landmass. , this is valuable.

Unlike the Earth’s magnetic field, which originates from the planet’s core and is more or less stable on human timescales, the Sun’s magnetic field warps and unwarps in 11-year cycles as the star rotates. That changing magnetic field gives rise to what the team predicts is a pattern of dramatic white spikes interspersed with dark gaps. This eclipse will be in sharp contrast to the 2017 coast-to-coast solar eclipse across the United States, when the sun was near its cycle minimum and the corona was also calmer and less structured.

Even in an age when several spacecraft are dedicated to observing the Sun, solar eclipses are a unique opportunity to understand our star, especially its lower corona. No human-made device blocks just the visible disk of the Sun and reveals the entire corona like a total solar eclipse. “There has never been an occultation disk like the Moon. This is the best occultation disk ever,” Rinker said.

Still, the forecasting project has benefited greatly from the recently launched spacecraft. This year’s forecast will incorporate data from Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency mission launched in 2020 and designed to provide a rare view of the star’s poles. The spacecraft will offer a rare glimpse into the Sun’s magnetic field from a different perspective than most observations along a straight line between the Sun and Earth.

Predicting the sun’s corona during a solar eclipse is more than just a clever trick. This requires understanding the sun’s magnetic field, the field that governs the bursts of plasma and radiation that can affect life on and around Earth. These phenomena, collectively known as space weather, can endanger navigation and communications satellites in orbit, as well as power grids. However, unlike the weather on Earth, scientists are still unable to make highly accurate predictions about the weather in space.

Rinker hopes the team’s predictive research this year, particularly its adventures in continuous modeling, will bring scientists one step closer to that goal, he says. “We think this new paradigm of modeling is very exciting for the future of space weather forecasting, because it’s very similar to the way weather forecasting is done.”