Why Eclipses Have Been So Important To Human History | Eclipse Chasers | Spark

Easter Island here the world's leading solar astronomers raced to witness one of Nature's great natural wonders a total eclipse of the sun to get a complete picture of the sun we have to go to eclipses their goal discover new Clues to the sun's deepest Mysteries and unlock secrets of the universe I don't think everybody understands how complicated the physics behind this type of of object really is throughout history eclipses have brought Waring Nations to their knees they thought it was an act of the Gods and that it might be the end of the the world provided key evidence in the search for the world's future energy needs it'll be a game changer even affirmed Einstein's theory of relativity seen as never before and a place of archaeological wonder the Easter Island eclipse Easter Island one of the most famous yet remote archaeological sites in the world to these isolated and mysterious Shores leading solar scientists have come to observe and analyze one of astronomy's most spectacular events a total solar eclipse Easter Island what a great place for an eclipse located 2,000 m off the South American coast of Chile the Island's 64 square mile landscape is rugged and remote formed from the remains of three extinct undersea volcanoes this looks very interesting months of preparation have gone into these Expeditions and astronomers must choose their observation sites carefully the Easter Island Eclipse will last for less than 5 minutes a narrow window of time for scientists to to complete their detailed work made even narrower by the threat of bad weather okay this is it I think we finally found the place if all goes well Eclipse scientists will observe key regions of the Sun that are best seen from Earth during a total eclipse not only do those regions hold essential secrets to the sun's inner workings they have a direct impact on life here on Earth throughout time the sun has been the one constant in our otherwise unpredictable history it rises and sets The Giver of all life yet the sun is also a star one of an estimated 200 billion in the Milky Way galaxy and even though solar satellites now provide varied and detailed views the Sun remains ruled by laws of physics and unimaginable forces that we are only beginning to grasp when you look in detail at the sun you can see that it's filled with very Dynamic and very large events and understanding these things and how this changes affect us here on the earth is something that we're still barely being able to do and as scientists now recognize even though the sun is 93 million mil away the activity can pose a very real threat to our way of [Music] life March 13th 1989 Quebec Canada's hydroelectric power system collapses in less than 90 seconds voltage swings wildly across the North American power grid a nuclear power plant falters the cause a geomagnetic storm born on the surface of the the Sun what you've got going on in the core of the Sun are millions and millions of hydrogen bombs going off per second compressed and held in by the gravity of the sun October 2003 a series of solar blasts equal to many billion megatons of TNT send shock waves of solar particles past the NASA solar satellite Soho headed toward Earth when those those particles hit less than one day later satellite Communications were disrupted authorities ordered transcontinental Airlines to re-root while astronauts aboard the International Space Station took cover their mission and possibly their Futures at risk this storm came around and produced some of the most intense electromagnetic disturbances in the space environment of the earth that we've seen for a really really long time because solar storm threaten so much of society's advanced technology learning to predict their occurrence has become a priority for space agencies around the world astronomers Now call this new field space weather space weather is a field that didn't exist 15 years ago and now now it's uh spread across several government agencies and and uh we're getting funding to do the research to try to understand it and be able to predict it but not all of solar science can be conducted in space cost alone makes it prohibitive we've got some great spacecraft uh to study the sun we've got some great Mountaintop observatories to study the Sun but there are still many things that we learn at eclipses that we can't learn at other times to get a complete picture of the sun we have to go to eclipses approximately every 18 months a total solar eclipse occurs somewhere in the world its timing and location dependent on the movement and rotations of the sun earth and moon a solar eclipse occurs when the moon happens to get in the right spot between the Sun and the Earth casting a shadow on the earth so the Earth is basically moving through the Moon Shadow and that's what a solar eclipse is predicting when and where an e Eclipse will occur reflects our basic understanding of planetary [Music] motion every 29 and 1/2 days the moon completes a single orbit around the Earth that means that once a month the moon passes in between the Earth and the Sun raising the possibility that a solar eclipse might occur but it's no sure thing why because the moon's orbit is actually tilted 5° relative to the Earth's so as the Moon and Earth orbit the Sun the relative position where the moon crosses between Earth and Sun changes in most months the Moon is simply too high or too low to cast a shadow on Earth's surface that shadow simply goes off into space and no eclipse occurs when a solar eclipse does occur most of the time the moon only covers a portion of the sun while at others it becomes engulfed in a ring of fire but approximately 25% of the time the Sun Moon and Earth glide into so exact an alignment that the sun surface is totally obscured a total eclipse of the Sun that it occurs at all is a stunning Coincidence of celestial geometry R measuring 864,000 M at its diameter the sun is approximately 400 times larger than our moon but the Moon is 400 times closer to Earth what this size to distance ratio means is that to us on Earth both the sun and moon appear virtually the same size in the sky this ratio of 400 times larger to the 400 times closer creates a perfect situation where the moon completely blocks out the solar surface and allows us on Earth to see a total solar eclipse we're the only planet in the solar system that experiences total solar eclipses and it's just a really neat coincidence that this this distance and size ratio um exists never lasting more than 8 minutes the period when the Sun Moon and Earth come into perfect alignment is called totality and with its bright glare removed the sun's hidden secrets are suddenly exposed the sun's a great big bowl of gas uh million miles across and we see that hot everyday surface giving us a lot of light but that's just a fuzzy atmosphere it just happens to look sharp because we can't see the edge in such detail but there's a whole region just around the everyday Sun that we can see best at eclipses think of looking at the sun like looking into the high beam of a car coming at you at night so bright that details are washed out and you can't see anything now take that light away and new details emerge that you couldn't see before in the case of a solar eclipse now we can see that the sun has an atmosphere just like here on Earth the Corona and it's here that we think that space weather might begin scientists refer to the bright everyday surface of the Sun as the Photosphere when the Photosphere light is covered during a total solar eclipse what appear are two otherwise invisible regions of the Sun the chromosphere The Thin Red layer along the solar Edge and the corona the sun's outer [Music] atmosphere not only do these regions reveal much about the everyday workings of the Sun but it is within them that violent solar storms rise and erupt so being able to see see and study these regions however briefly is why scientists go to eclipses but why Easter Island shouldn't everyone be able to see the total eclipse from their own backyard well it seems natural that during the time of the eclipse anyone standing on a side of the earth facing the sun should be able to see the eclipse but that's not how it works there are actually two Shadows that the moon casts upon the Earth this first one it's very large and very diffuse thousands of miles in size is the pen arble Shadow inside of the pen arble Shadow an observer can only expect to see a partial eclipse of the Sun the moon doesn't completely block out the Sun but here in this much smaller much darker Shadow the umbrell shadow no more than a couple of hundred miles in size the moon completely blocks out the Sun and here you can expect to see a total eclipse the trajectory of that umbra shadow across the face of the earth is known as the path of totality for the Easter Island Eclipse that path will begin just south of the South Pacific Isis of Tonga then race easterly at more than 1,000 mph the length of that path might be 10 or 12,000 mil long uh but it's very narrow and it only covers a small fraction of 1% of the Earth's surface so when we're preparing to observe an eclipse we look on a map and we see where that path is going to cover where we have have to be to be within the path it turns out that the only substantial land that goes over is Easter Island and other than that it's going over Pacific Ocean so powerful is the experience of totality that ancient peoples took eclipses as a sign of grave danger and The Descent of an evil Darkness they didn't know the mechanics that this was a natural phenomenon they thought it was an act of the Gods and that it might the end of the the world over the centuries total's Darkness has often been associated with ominous historic events including some believe the crucifixion of Jesus but for civilizations like the Maya the quest to understand these fearsome events gave rise to rigorous recordkeeping creating an ancient database remarkable for its insight I think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required today knowing when and where a total eclipse will occur can be predicted down to the second yet that doesn't make the job of our Easter Island Eclipse scientists any less difficult we're going to be ready but we're dependent on all the equipment functioning on the weather being good if something goes wrong then we'll have to wait another couple of years for the next total solar eclipse will the weather cooperate and what Clues to the sun's Mysteries will scientists discover in the hours to come only time will tell as the countown to the Easter Island Eclipse begins the Sun never before have we better understood its massive scale nor devoted so much attention to its most explosive features the energy output of the sun is hard to imagine but if we stop for a second and consider the amount of energy that man has produced over the past 5 or 10,000 years the sun produces a million times more energy every second this Sun's violent storms rise within the solar atmosphere including the corona the region of the Sun that can best be observed from Earth during a total solar eclipse with the stakes High scientists have raced to the Easter Island Eclipse if all goes well they'll make detailed observations of the Corona in order to begin to master its secrets their investigation begins with current theories that the corona generates a steady stream of solar particles that blow outward into space the solar wind that Corona doesn't just stop at some hard boundary it actually streams outward the entire solar system is permeated by this ever outflowing constantly dynamically changing wind and this wind blows past all the planets the asteroid s all the way to the very edge of the solar system how the sun's Corona accelerates that wind is a crucial question for Eclipse scientists especially those focused on its violent storms yet the sun's Corona is so complex that even its basic features seem to defy everyday physics here on Earth beginning with an illogical puzzle why is the Corona so high hot if you're sitting in front of a stove and you're too hot you move away and it gets cooler well if you're at the solar Photosphere the everyday surface of the Sun and you move away you move outward into the chromospheric corona it gets hotter so that seems odd off hand and so why is that temperatures inside the solar core boil at 27 million de F but cool to 10,000 de F by the time they reach the sun's surface yet continue outward into the Corona and temperatures suddenly soar back up ranging from 1 million to 5 million de F it's doing something that we don't quite understand it's transporting energy from the cold part to the hot part in fact the distance from which it goes from about 10,000 degrees to this million degree is only on the order of like 50 miles during the Easter Island Eclipse scientists will use their brief access to the corona to find answers to this strange contradiction the problem has been solved it's been solved a dozen times over and there are a dozen different answers so of course that means it really hasn't been solved and we want to choose among those different solutions on Easter Island many scientists will focus their attention on a very narrow portion of the Sun the inner Corona where the Corona and Photosphere interface a region that appears no larger than a human hair to the naked eye to make their observations scientists must deploy a variety of powerful optical devices to gather and record their data we are studying the inner solar Corona using the last phog graph which is Possible only during the total solar eclipses in this regard modern Eclipse science hasn't changed all that much since its Inception during the 19th Century Modern Eclipse science began in the 1840s when a new wave of European scientists made crucial observations of the Sun and Corona that laid the cornerstones for today's solar studies there was a total eclipse that passed through Europe in 1842 and that was the first time in centuries that any European scientist had a chance to see a total eclipse they were totally amazed at the corona they didn't know anything about the corona so here was a new mystery to try to uncover 19th century Eclipse scientists were among the first to use photography which had been invented only years before and they would soon employ another new invention a spectroscope spectroscopy allows us to take light from a far away source and compare it to standards here on Earth to figure out what something's made out of heat any chemical element from the Periodic Chart like potassium and it will reveal a distinct color when viewed through a spectroscope that color forms a very specific pattern of bright lines across the Spectrum like a fingerprint unique only to that element compare potassium spectral pattern to lithium then to iron if we know that sodium burns with a certain color and we see that same color coming from a foreign object um in this case the sun we can be positive that that is that sodium is present there we can even infer by their intensities how much of those elements are present spectrosc op y initiated a rapid new understanding of the Sun including the recognition that it was made of hydrogen in the form of super hot gas today known as plasma next eclipse scientists armed with spectroscopes discovered the element helium never before seen But now accepted as the second most abundant element in the universe this new element that was discovered was given a name helium for the sun Helios the discovery of helium by Eclipse scientists marked a turning point in our understanding of the Sun the first hint of the complex thermonuclear engine churning within its core an engine fueled by nuclear fusion fusion is a nuclear reaction which produces energy it's when light Atomic nuclei usually isotopes of hydrogen combined to form heavier Atomic nuclei and energy is released in the process at normal temperatures hydrogen atoms repel one another just like two common magnets but within the intense heat of the solar core that repulsion is overcome hydrogen nuclei now Collide fusing together to form helium and releasing intense energy in the form of gamma rays even at the speed of light their Journey will last up to a million years as they randomly bump their way through the dense mass of particles those Rays finally emerge from the surface of the Sun as light for their 8-minute trip to Earth so next time you go outside on a sunny day remember that light was generated within the sun's core up to a million years ago here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's plasma Fusion Center researchers believe that Fusion May one day solve The World's energy needs beginning with experiments inside a fusion reactor known as the alcator C Mod one of only three in the country 3 2 1 entering [Music] pulse it only lasts 2 seconds but during those 2 seconds we're pumping the power demand of entire city into a small chamber a few meters in diameter it's really amazing thing that happens here every 20 minutes for now the physics of plasma and nuclear fusion are so complex that any chance of recreating the sun's nuclear furnace remains only an exciting experiment but hope remains High we really believe that we can have a major impact on the future energy balance of the world and uh if we if we are successful uh it'll make it'll it'll be a game changer in just a few minutes the Easter Island Eclipse will begin with what scientists term first Contact the instant when the moon begins to cover the sun it is the first stage on the march to totality yet for most viewers here on Easter Island first Contact will be invisible when viewed only with the naked eye the strong glare of the Sun remains too blindingly bright to overcome this glare Eclipse scientists deploy a variety of solar filters on their telescopes and other instruments few more powerful than those on this new mobile solar telescope which filters the Sun's light at the wavelength hydrogen Alpha the telescope looks at a very specific wavelength of light the the sun of course is made up mainly of hydrogen and helium as you start to tune the filter the telescope to the correct line which is the hydrogen line you'll actually start to see features appearing coming out of the sun this is the area of the sun where you actually see the cause and effect of what all the other layers of the sun underneath are doing and while NASA and other space agencies have similar systems aboard their most ADV advaned satellites never before has a total solar eclipse been recorded and broadcast through such a device there's been very little information done about what you can actually see through a hydrogen Alpha filter during an eclipse so yeah we yet to see uh probably some very exciting uh phenomenon occurring once that starts to happen one of the most exciting and important phenomena that science s hope to see during the Easter Island Eclipse are solar prominences fiery red arcs of plasma that twist outward from the sun's surface this is space weather in action captured here in timlapse photography and only during a total solar eclipse are these prominences visible to the naked eye these are bright red clouds of hydrogen gas in close to the surface of the Sun and they extend out Beyond the Edge of the Moon as these red tongues of of fire although prominences appear small during an eclipse as much as 100 billion tons of solar plasma flow through these Majestic Loops that can rise over 100,000 mil into space to a height over 12 times the diameter of Earth often these prominences can turn inexplicably violent hurling the equivalent energy of millions of hydrogen bombs into space the volcano analogy is a pretty good one they'll develop and they might sit for a day or a week and then all of a sudden they get in a bad Boot and they erupt and and you wonder why did they decide to erupt now what's the straw that breaks the camel back to understand the forces that generate these prominences from within the sun scientists use not only sight but sound what you hear is the vibrating heartbeat of the sun enhanced by audio engineering through a remarkable science known as Helio seismology scientists can use the sun's acoustic waves to create a virtual ultrasound of the sun's interior just as Earthbound geologists use sound to probe for oil or potential earthquake fault lines what that ultrasound reveals is a sun in constant twisting motion the sun is a huge ball of very very hot gas and it's not solid like the Earth and so it will actually rotate at different speeds depending on where it is on the surface and inside the Sun deep inside the Sun solar plasma completes one full rotation approximately every 27 days a speed slightly slower than on the surface at the equator at Mid latitude the sun's rotation takes nearly 26 days and at the poles nearly 34 days so it's it's all this gas that's basically rotating at different speeds and I don't think everybody understands how complicated the physics behind this type of of object really is scientists theorize that as these huge walls of plasma Spin and Shear against one another they function like a giant Power Station creating powerful electric currents and intense magnetism the sun's magnetic Dynamo a Dynamo means some mechanism for converting mechanical motion into electricity so it it is believed that there's something moving around in the Sun and that's making electricity an effect and that electricity is making magnetic fields and it is those magnetic fields that form solar prominences creating the loop-like structures that scientists often observe during a total eclipse few are more familiar with the consequences of the sun's electromagnetic Dynamo than Dr Paul bellan and his team at the California Institute of Technology here they generate smallscale artificial prominences in what is called a plasma gun a unique invention that allows scientists to study the sun's electromagnetic properties up close they rise they twist up they get bigger they explode they merge with each other they do all sorts of crazy things there's a lot of complexity although nothing compared to the sun's actual power the plasma gun still requires more than 100,000 amps and a powerful electromagnet to create a simulated prominence for less than 1 second only a camera firing 3 million frames per second allows scientists to glean hints of the highly ordered structures within this seeming electromagnetic chaos a magnetized plasma has a very um organized magnetically organized way of Behaving that's why when you look on the surface of the Sun at these beautiful NASA images you'll see these archways of plasma what's happening is you've got a magnetic loop that is bubbling through the surface of the Sun then the plasma that makes up the sun has an easy time filling up this Loop but then it's trapped it's magnetically confined as we say the large magnetic Loops of plasma that form prominences rise upward from the sun's surface and into the corona yet are held by other magnetic fields creating and ever building pressure one way to picture it is that the magnetic field lines are kind of like rubber bands and you stretch them only so long and then they snap but when they snap they instantly reconnect into another reconfiguration no one fully understands what triggers these prominences to snap but the result is clear an eruption of solar plasma traveling millions of miles an hour into the solar system these explosions are called coronal mass ejections when this explosive wave of solar particles hits Earth our own magnetosphere blunts much of its impact forming stunning light displays known as auroras but the bigger the solar storm the greater the potential Havoc the space weather storms set up currents in the upper part of the Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere those currents are reflected underneath in the solid earth and they feed into the power grid at the Transformers known as geomagnetic induced currents these Rogue electromagnetic forces eagerly seek out our largest power lines causing their steel cores to heat the power the sheer power there are tens of billions of watts of power dumped in these auroral events Transformers explode power drains in one region and spikes in another and when there is no longer enough enough power as in the 1989 solar storm the entire system collapses since grids today are all connected this can cause kind of a progressive failure that could propagate uh across the country the largest solar storm on record occurred in 1859 trumping the events of 1989 and 2003 one recent report suggests an event of similar magnitude would cause m destruction in the most severe case you lose distribution of goods and food and the purification of water uh these are all the worst scenarios that could happen a solar storm can actually produce catastrophic effect on this planet which can be about 20 times uh more economic damage than the Hurricane Katrina uh produced nearly 240,000 miles above the Earth the Moon is now moved into the first stages of alignment with the sun in less than 90 minutes totality will begin after so much work only the weather can interfere with the crucial views that scientists have traveled so far to see the Easter Island eclipse is [Music] coming the Easter Island eclipse is less than 15 minutes away with the clock ticking Eclipse scientists scan the sky for changes in the weather couldn't be better look at that sky clear from there to there the Easter Island Eclipse could prove significant not just in the race to understand space weather but also to answer some potentially troubling questions about the sun's long-term future and ours as Dynamic and volatile as the sun can be it also displays measurable consistencies including an 11-year rise fall and rise in its magnetic activity known as the solar cycle every 11 years the sun's Behavior changes from relative calm known as solar minimum to a period of phenetic and stormy magnetic activity solar maximum and then back again that's kind of the way nature Works in Cycles it goes from Maximum to minimum uh it's pretty regular but there are times when it does things we don't expect and when that solar cycle varies from its predicted course as it's doing right now Eclipse scientists have reason to worry Earth is on a very delicate balance with the energy budget that we we receive from the Sun any small fluctuations will have important ramifications for life here on Earth in one case it could produce ice ages in another case it could produce drought and even evaporate the Seas a massive increase in the sun's magnetic activity during an intense solar maximum could some scientists theorize lead to temperature increases within the Earth's ocean and changes in the winds rains and winter storms but that's not the concern right now in fact just the opposite is true for more than 3 years we've been in a prolonged solar minimum creating striking changes in the sun's Behavior so the whole sun is very quiet the corona is very quiet it's melting away to some extent we've seen the extent of the corona diminish from the 2006 eclipse we observed in Greece to the 2008 Eclipse we observed in Siberia to the 2009 Eclipse we observed in China and probably it will be even more diminished in the 2010 eclipse on Easter Island we haven't seen anything like this in at least 100 years could this extended period of solar minimum portend colder times ahead no one knows for sure but Recent research using Arctic ice cor samples match to Historic records seems to suggest that the last great fallof in solar activity known as the Mand minimum resulted in intensified Winters during the 17th and 18th centuries some call this past era when overall temperatures dropped by as much as 2° the little Ice Age so it's getting to a very interesting maybe even worrisome situation at some point point if the sun really really changes activity level we're talking about survival of our species at the level we would like to maintain one approach to monitor these solar fluctuations is to maintain a constant vigil of the Sun's diameter variations in the Earth's atmosphere coupled with the sun's distorting glare make measuring the Sun's diameter near impossible on an ordinary day not so during a total solar eclipse when the size of the Moon's Shadow provides the essential clue positioning themselves at the outer limits of the path of totality two teams of observers one at the North side and the other at the South can mark the edges of the moon's umbra shadow to within 300 ft once the umbra's overall size is determined scientists simply work backwards using the known size of the Moon and the known distances to the Moon and Sun to calculate the sun's size size to within a mere 20 mil and then you can compare that to eclipses taking place in other years in the past and see if the Sun's diameter has changed between these different eclipses careful calculations have always been Central to Eclipse science and some of those calculations have changed the very way we view our universe when Einstein came up with his theory of relativity he realized that one way to test it was during an eclipse does gravity affect light even bend it like a lens it seems hard to believe but Einstein's theory said yes but only an object as large as the sun could generate enough gravity to allow us to see those changes so in 1919 Eclipse scientists set out to prove him right the concept was simple photograph a group of stars when they're observed unobstructed by an eclipse then photograph them again during a total solar eclipse when nearly hidden by the eclipse if Einstein's theory were correct the Stars would appear slightly offset to the viewer on Earth because the Sun's gravity would bend their light causing the observed location of the Stars to shift and Einstein's theory predicted how much those Stars should shift in a in a photographic plate and it turns out he was exactly correct today relativity impacts not just our understanding of astronomical wonders like black holes but how NASA lands a Rover on Mars as well as guaranteeing the GPS navigation system in your car from an everyday standpoint things like GPS absolutely would not work if you did not include the effects of Relativity the whole GPS system would be worthless if you didn't have relativity so the next time you take a cross country trip remember that that a total solar eclipse helped get you where you wanted to go in just a few minutes the Easter Island Eclipse will begin just hours ago the moon's umbrell Shadow first fell across the Earth deep in the South Seas and began to race along the path of totality toward Easter Island at more than 1,000 mph anticipation is high and as veteran scientists make their final adjustments they begin to watch for the breathtaking phenomena usually seen at the onset of a total solar eclipse it's a shock even to people in the 21st century I've seen an eclipse I knew exactly what was going to happen when it was going to happen down to the second and I was still blown away when it actually happened the lighting during an eclipse is different than any other natural circumstance or unnatural circumstance The Horizon looks like Dawn or dusk but 360° around I've seen cows heading back to the barn as though it were evening uh flowers begin to close up as though it were night uh sometimes bats might start coming out the last few minutes before totality even the ground will start to dance and Shimmer in unusual ways one of the most interesting effects that happens during the partial phases of a total eclipse that is things which are very ordinary like a shadow from this plant start to become very extraordinary so what I've done is I've set up a 5,000 watt light to act as my sun and I've created a disc which will act as my moon so right now the sun is doing what it normally does the light is shining onto this plant and we see very ordinary shadows as we would normally expect as the eclipse starts to happen things change and now I can see little Eclipse Sun on the ground this is because light coming from my sun is trying to make its way through the plant the leaves are blocking most of it but the patterns of the leaves in the plant start to form tiny little spaces pinhole cameras and due to the physics of the way light works these little pin holes will focus the light and make actual focused images of the Sun and I can exaggerate that using my hand and the spaces between my fingers will act as their own pinhole cameras as if there are more leaves and a small Breeze blowing and those images will start to dance around on the ground and it becomes a very incredible effect surrounded by these Eerie Sensations there are many who seek purification or shelter during an eclipse based on Traditions that date back centuries it really is very all inspiring to see it get dark in the middle of the day the partial part of the eclipse takes an hour and a half or so it gets gradually darker but the last 15 minutes or so you really see that the the light is strange the Shadows get very eerily sharp and then the last 15 seconds or so it gets about a million times darker when you look up you see this diamond ring in the sky a bright bead of sunlight as the moon covers The Last Remnant of the sun's bright glare a final flash of light will appear in what is known as the diamond ring effect all of a sudden it gets a million times brighter to see it get a million times darker darker and then a million times brighter within a few seconds is just a a fabulous thing now this diamond is going to break up in a few seconds into a series of beads as sunlight shines down the narrow valleys along the moon's Edge those beads are caused by the last vestages of sunlight shining through the mountains and crevices along the moon's Edge creating a sparkling effect known as Bailey's beads named for the forefather of eclipse science when these beads disappear totality begins it'll look reddish around the edge of the sun that'll be the chromosphere a thin layer of the outer solar atmosphere then that'll get covered after a few seconds and you see the Corona for the duration of the eclipse once in totality viewers can remove their protective eyewear the only time we can stare directly at the Sun never does totality last more than 8 minutes on Easter Island it will last for 4 minutes and 41 seconds you can do a lot in four minutes you can take a lot of photographs you can take a lot of looks and then all too soon you get these phenomena in reverse the partial eclipse will still last another hour and a half but it's been said that nobody ever saw the end of of this partial eclipse because you're so excited so now we are ready the cameras are locked researchers in position we are only seconds from totality and the onset of the Easter Island Eclipse no longer do you have to imagine what the real Easter Island Eclipse will be now you are [Applause] there Easter Island scientists from around the world have gathered here to witness a total solar eclipse the countdown has begun in a matter of seconds totality there a last burst of sunlight and a final Halo the diamond ring effect the red Edge you see is the first appearance of the chromosphere we now stand in the full shadow of the moon this is totality the white wisps of the corona are now visible within its layers is Born the solar wind fueled as we watch by enigmatic forces that we have only begun to understand less than 4 days from now particles within that wind will blow across earth bathing our North Pole and creating the Aurora Borealis in 2 weeks that same gust of solar wind will sweep over the moons of Jupiter and then almost 3 weeks later the rings of Saturn only beyond the orbit of Pluto at the edges of the hel heliosphere will this wind finally dissipate more than 10 billion miles from where it began this is the most incredible thing i' ever SE it's nothing like the pictures and you can I there's so many things you don't even realize until you actually see it we are now nearly 4 minutes into the Easter Island eclipse the final stretch for Eclipse scientists to make their last observations in just a few more seconds the sun's harsh glare will reemerge along the western rim of the Moon and now totality is over will the Easter Island Eclipse prove decisive in the search for solutions to the sun's Mysteries there's no way to tell at least not yet we then take the data back to Williams College and work on our computers for months or years to straighten things out what is clear is that solar science is never a Sprint only a marathon it took almost 6 months to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity Based on data from the 1919 Eclipse Easter Island will prove no different yet amidst such painstaking work our son 93 million miles away remains our nearest Celestial laboratory if we can study one star in really great detail and learn what makes a tick then we have the key to understanding essentially the rest of the universe so we can look at stars that are really far away and they're a pinpoint of light and okay you can get a lot of information and astronomers have done an amazing job but there's really no substitute for being able to uh look up close at this amazing uh star in the meantime across the world the march to master the Sun and predict space weather continues with missions like the solar Dynamic Observatory launched by NASA in 2010 and by 2018 solar probe a mission that will fly directly into the teeth of the corona itself locking into orbit seven times closer to the Sun than ever before you really need to probe out there that can actually touch smell taste the sun that's what these sensors on solar probe will do they will actually measure the particles their velocity their density their magnetic field I mean how exciting is that but even as new technologies emerge in the race to solve the sun's greatest riddles the experience of a total solar eclipse will never be obsolete not just for the rich history his and traditions it represents but as a constant reminder of Nature's Wonder and our Eternal search to find our place within [Music] it

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Length: 50min 49sec (3049 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024