eclipse Eclipse research activitiesastronomy

During a total solar eclipse, when the Moon has fully covered the Sun’s brilliant visible disk, the faint extensive outer atmosphere of the Sun, known as the corona, is revealed. Just prior to this event, the chromosphere, a thin bright red layer in the lower solar atmosphere, appears for a few seconds at the edge of the Sun’s disk. Then, as the chromosphere vanishes, the corona leaps into view. Pearly white coronal streamers can be seen far beyond the Moon’s dark disk, sometimes to a distance several times the Sun’s radius. When the corona is made visible, astronomers can observe and record its details.

Because the corona is a million times fainter than the disk of the Sun, it cannot be seen unaided in broad daylight. In 1930 the French astronomer Bernard Lyot invented the coronagraph, a specialized telescope that produces an artificial eclipse of the Sun. Astronomers could then study the corona any day when the aureole, the bright ring around the Sun composed of light scattered by particles in the Earth’s atmosphere, was not especially bright. Nevertheless, the daytime sky near the Sun is at least a thousand times darker during a total eclipse than otherwise. Therefore, total eclipses continued to provide the best opportunities to study the Sun’s outer atmosphere until the mid-1970s, when suborbital rocket and satellite observatories became available.

Observatories in space have several important advantages over surface-based instruments, being immune to weather and bright skies and above the distorting and filtering effects of Earth’s atmosphere. On the other hand, they are exceedingly expensive and require years of development and construction. In comparison, an eclipse expedition—the establishment of a temporary observation station in the path of totality of an upcoming eclipse—is relatively cheap and highly flexible in design. Therefore, despite their limitations, surface-based observations of total solar eclipses continue to play a role in gathering new knowledge about the Sun.

Among the many important advances that were made during past total eclipses, three notable ones can serve as examples—the discovery of the element helium, experimental support for the general theory of relativity, and the discovery that the Sun’s corona is exceedingly hot.