by If you are on the path of completeness for the April 8 total solar eclipse, you will experience a short period of darkness – total – for a few seconds or minutes. This is the only safe time to look directly at the sun without eclipse sunglasses. If you notice the sunDuring the entire corona, you may see dark pink towers and loops of electrically charged plasma extending several times. the diameter of the Earth in space. During the last total solar eclipse, in Australia on April 20, 2023, these “Visuals” were amazing – and huge.
These sights will most certainly be visible during totality in North America on April 8, as the sun will likely be at its 11-year zenith. solar cyclecalled solar maximum.
Prominences can be visible for days – you can look at them any time you want, if you use a hydrogen alpha telescope – but there are a few other rare phenomena that you might see during totality. This is the amount of solar activity to look for during totality solar eclipse.
Related: 10 things you probably didn’t know about the 2024 total solar eclipse
1. Coronary mass ejection
Coronary mass ejection
Frequency: Multiple times per month
Length: Several times
Appearance: A stationary, spiral-like structure in the sun’s corona
Previous views: 1860 and 2020
One such phenomenon that may be seen is a coronary mass ejection (CME).
“If we’re lucky, a CME will manifest itself as a complex, spiral-like structure high in the sun’s atmosphere,” Ryan Frenchsolar physicist at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, and author “The Sun: A Beginner’s Guide to Our Local Star (Collins, 2023), told Space.com. CME is a major elimination magnetic field and plasma mass from the sun’s corona. It moves quickly but looks stationary over a few hours.
“What this means, however, is that Rochester could be seeing the same eruption as it was in Dallas, at different stages of the same long-term eruption,” French said.
It will take 100 minutes for the moonto cross North America, so that CME could pass right before and be visible to everyone under a clear sky.
CMEs will certainly occur during totality. One image was made of them on 14 December 2020during the “Great Patagonian Eclipse” in Chile, when the sun was close to solar minimum.
2. Solar flares
Solar flares
Frequency: Multiple times per month
Length: A few minutes
Appearance: A red loop close to the surface of the sun
Solar flares powerful bursts of radio waves, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays at the surface of the sun that travels at speed of light and only achieved eight minutes World. They often follow CME.
Although three solar flares that reached class X — the highest level of intensity — ended in passing one week in Februaryit is very likely that one will be seen during totality.
“A solar flare is different from a CME – it’s located much lower in the the atmosphere of the suncloser to the edge of the moon, and they would only be visible for a few minutes,” said the French.
However, the timing and location of solar flares and CMEs would have to be just right. “To be visible from Earth, it must be located above the edge of the sun – so as not to block the moon – during a few full minutes,” said the French.
3. “Giant eruptive prominences”
“Giant eruptive prominences”
Frequency: Multiple times per month
Length: A few days
Appearance: Towers and red loops extending from the surface of the sun into the corona
Previous views: 1919 and 1946
We will see prominence during totality on April 8th. “Significance comes in a wide range of sizes and they are more common during solar maximum,” said French. “Sometimes a prominence erupts, detaches from the surface of the sun and expands into the Solar system.”
It would be a spectacular sight, but what eclipse chasers really want to see is the prominence of a “massive eruption” – detached from the sun’s surface and free-floating in the corona.
“There are several examples of such visible eruptions over the last few months, each of which would give a spectacular show if it occurred during a total solar eclipse,” said the French. “But it is worth noting that the eclipse will still be available in terms of Stationary, non-eruptive significant; they will just be smaller and closer to the surface of the sun than they would be mid-eruption .”
Expand full to see more eruptions
“The problem with eclipses is that they only last a few minutes, so you usually can’t make measurements time,” Amir Caspi, chief scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Space.com. “However, the sun is extremely dynamic; some processes take minutes or even seconds, such as a solar flare or CME,” said Caspi.
Since such brief events are unlikely to occur during totality, there is only one solution: make totality longer. One way to stretch it is to get into a supersonic jet and chase the moon’s shadow. Scientists did that in 1973 using Concorde, achieving a total of 73 minutes.
The other option is to film the eclipsed sun for a few minutes from across the entire continent, hoping that someone, somewhere, will find the beginning or end of an event. That rarely happens, but it will on April 8th. On that day, totality will enter the United States in Texas at 1:27 pm CDT and leave Maine at 3:35 pm EDT – a total of 68 minutes.
The Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse (CATE 2024) project, led by Caspi, is an effort to make a 60-minute continuous 3D film of the sun’s corona in polarized light, using 35 teams of three to four citizen scientists . Each will use standardized cameras and settings and hope for the sun’s luck.
