Solar Eclipse Will Reveal Stunning Corona, Scientists Predict
Predicting what the sun will look like during a total solar eclipse is a helpful exercise for scientists in the long quest to understand how our star works
Predictive Science Inc.’s prediction one week in advance of what the sun’s magnetic field will look like on eclipse day, April 8, 2024.
This article is part of a special report on the total solar eclipse that will be visible from parts of the U.S., Mexico and Canada on April 8, 2024.
Solar eclipse chasers have good reason to hope for a particularly spectacular sight on April 8 when the moon briefly passes in front of the sun.
But not everyone is content to wait until the big moment to see what the sun will look like. A team of scientists is using supercomputers and extra-fresh data to predict the appearance of the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The region is only apparent during a total solar eclipse, when the moon precisely blocks out the light from the sun’s visible surface, so the exercise allows scientists to test their understanding of how the sun’s magnetic field governs the star’s atmosphere.
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And these days that magnetic field is super active, making it extra difficult for researchers to anticipate the view of the corona. “We knew going into this that the sun is very dynamic now. It’s near the maximum phase of the solar cycle,” says heliophysicist Jon Linker, president and senior research scientist at Predictive Science Inc. He and his colleagues first ventured into modeling the corona during eclipses in the mid-1990s. The basic physics reflected in the process has remained constant for three decades, although the calculation technology…
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