Oh hey, it's your friend with too much stuff hanging from his rear view mirror. Ali Ward. Let's get started. Let's dip into it. This one is about the Sun. We got eclips, trivia and tips and dates tossed in. It's also a Bogo it's a buy one, get one because we have two guests. Thank you NASA for both of them, and thank you to wildlife ecology ologists Corina Newssim for the intro to India. So I'm gonna be honest, we weren't even going to cover this ology right now.
If we did, we should have put it out a couple weeks ago. I've always wanted to cover it, but kind of at the last minute, I decided to trek to see the eclipse in Texas, and I selfishly, selfishly wanted to know how the sun works because everyone's talking about it, and because everything alive on Earth would be dead without it. It's a key player. I was like, let's get this done. So these two guests. One is a research scientist and the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center now. The other has a bachelor's and a master's in mathematics and is on the cusp of totality in regards to her PhD and astrophysics from Georgia State University. She's self taught in ten computer programming languages. She studies solar energetic particles, coronal mass ejections, and has had multiple internships with NASA's helio Analytics department at NASA Goddard.
And these are the folks you want to talk to about the Sun, and we will in a sec But first, thank you to all of our patrons at patroon dot com slash Ologies, who for one dollar a month can submit questions before I record. And thank you to everyone wearing Ologies merch from Ologiesmarch dot com and for zero dollars.
Thank you for supporting Ologies just by leaving reviews, and you know I read them all and to prove that, thank you to very far from the matting crowd who said that Ologies is like a cuddle from a friend and a hug from the universe and a tickle fight for my brain and very far from the matting crowd, so they put off writing that review for the last five years, So thank you. It's worth the wait. If
you've left a review, I've read it now heliology. Helio straight up means sun in Greek, but the word eclipse I just found this out comes from the Latin for a failure to appear, which sounds kind of like the sun is in some hot water with the judicial system. But in this episode, we're going to shed some light on what the Sun is made of. Is it fire or not? How old is it? How big is it? What does the surface of the Sun look like? When will it implode on us? What rays are coming off
of it? What is a sun spot, a solar storm? And eclipse an ejection of coronal mass? Are our electronics safe? Also? Where can an eclipse happen? Should you go see one? Is it that big of a deal? What happens if you step out and stare directly into the sun. So get to know the center of our solar system with heliologists, doctor Michael Kirk and almost just days away from defending so I'm declaring it here, doctor India Jackson, let's hop right in and meet Michael.
My name is Michael Kirk, I pronounced are he? Him?
And his?
And now we were talking about anome's versusologies. You study the sun, so technically you are a heliologist has anyone ever called you that?
Or no, No, you're the first person to ever call me a heliologist. We typically call ourselves heliophysicists or you know, solar scientists or something like that. But heliologists, no, I've never heard that one before, but thanks. Heliophysics is actually a relatively new term. It was sort of coined back
in the late nineties mid nineties. So in terms of, you know, the way science goes, this is like still a very youthful idea of heliophysics, because what it used to be is solar science, you know, studying the Sun, and then you study space, and then you study the eurosuparate atmosphere. And they were quickly realizing they're all related with each other. They're all, you know, part of the what we call the heliosphere. So that's where heliophysics came from.
And so even the word heliophysics is not very well known in scientific communities, let alone the general public. But we're sort of on a mission that you know, five year olds know Trannosaurus rex. That's a hard work, so we should know heliophysics as well.
I had no idea that it was a newer term. This is exciting about what exactly is a heliosphere. I don't think I've ever heard that term before.
Yeah, So heliosphere is everything the Sun touches. That's the sort of easiest way to describe it. So the Sun of course is the source of all our light and heat on Earth, but it also is pushing out radiation particles. There is a reasonably well defined boundary where it the influence the Sun pushes out into interstellar space, and at some point the other stars in our galaxy are pushing back, and so there's a boundary that the Sun's and radiation
influence in a bubble, and that's called the heliosphere. And so all of the planets are inside the heliosphere. The only things that we know of that are outside of the heliosphere right now are the voidge spacecraft They actually cross the boundary are now and interstellar space.
So just to quick aside, the Voyager one and Voyager two space probe crafts. They were launched in the late summer of nineteen seventy seven. They have both crossed interstellar space beyond our Son's heliosphere in twenty twelve and twenty eighteen, respectively, and Voyager one is about twenty four billion kilometers or fifteen billion miles away, and Voyager two, after cruising pass the gas planets of our solar system, is now roughly
twenty billion kilometers or twelve billion miles from Earth. Meanwhile, I can't make it past an eight hour road trip without stopping five times to pee and three times to purchase truck stop coffee. Also, Michael says that they're having like a few communication issues with the voyagers, but I'm sorry, they are communicating from several billion miles away. Give them
grace for not returning your text. NASA, calm down. So these voyagers, they're voyaging away tens of billions of miles just for scale, distance wise, the Sun is just a mere ninety three ish million miles or one hundred and fifty million kilometers away. That's right in our galactic backyard. And now, if we can see stars distantly, we're not in their heliosphere though, right, we can just see pinpoints of light. How do you determine if you can still see something?
Oh? Oh wow, if you can see something, well, so the sunlight, like all light falls off exponentially, So every two meters you move out from an object, the light falls off to four meters or to four times the amount, so it's it's exponentially decreasing. So as you move away from the Sun, its brightness is limited, and eventually you need bigger and bigger telescopes or bigger, bigger apertures to
be able to see that increasingly faint starlight. I mean, that's why we launched NASA launched James Web, was to create a really big mirror in space to capture really dim objects in So in terms of the Sun's influence, the radiation pushing out from the Sun, there's light that it's going to go off into space pretty much forever.
But there is a defined boundary of that solar wind flow that flows out from the Sun and provides a fluid pressure, so like a pressure of you know, you put your hand in front of a water spicket and you feel the water pressure and it's a whole lot less from the Sun, but there's a pressure pushing out. So that's what we define as the edge of the Sun's influence. So each star has this bubble around it
of where it is completely dominant. It's pushing out all of the other stuff from the universe, and in defining this protective or captive bubble around it. And then depending on how big the star is, how bright it is, how active it is, those size of those bubbles change of the heliosphere itself, and so.
That solar wind is just a term for how it's putting pressure on other things. Are you ever mad that it's called wind? Is that so confusing?
No? Actually, it's a great term because solar wind gets you to sort of think about a little bit of its weather too. So there's their space weather as well, and the solar wind is sort of the it's always their wind blowing out from the Sun. By wind, I mean these are particles, magnetic fields, so protons, neutrons, electrons, magnetic fields just always being pushed out from the Sun all the time. And this wind is carried out in streams and in clumps and in blobs, and it is
pushed out. But calling it wind makes you think like, oh, that must be some sort of weather phenomenon. And that's that's exactly why it's a really good term. Because space weather is the changing environment in space caused by the Sun, and so astronauts deal with it. Satellites deal with it, I mean, planets deal with it too. Our Earth and upper atmosphere changes depending on the space weather conditions.
Oh okay, I thought you were gonna be like, yeah, it sucks, they call it wind. I gotta really try to explain that when it's career day.
Yeah, there are the terms I think are terrible, but that's not one of them.
So what else is terrible?
Oh?
Can you smell any beans?
Well?
So, I think the hardest thing is that we use the term solar system to just talk about the planets. And okay, so yeah, you have the planets in the solar system, and everybody learns the Solar system and you learn the names of the planets, But the solar system, if you like, think about the words. It's about the Sun and the relationship between the Sun and the planets. And so I think the term solar system is great.
I just wish we could like include a little bit more Sun in that solar system description instead of just talking about Saturn and Uranus and Neptune.
That's such a good point. It is called the solar system, and I feel like I know the least about the Sun, and this is a great time to help me actually visualize it. So the Sun is it a huge ball of fire. Is it plasma? Is it just a light? What is this sun even made up? Do we know?
Yes? Okay, okay, well next question.
Oh no, he's kidding, but also not. Let's check with another NASA goddard scientist, India Jackson almost PhD Okay.
My name is India Jackson. My pronouns are she her.
So let's say that you had to describe what the sun was or like how big it is? I have no concept of how big the Sun is, like none. Are there just arms of plasma that are giant coming off of it? Like I can't even visualize it.
Well, you know the Solar Dynamic Observatory. Have you heard of that? No, But you can see daily live images of the Sun and it looks like a ball because the gravity is pushing towards the center. So that's why it looks like a ball. And then you will get some solar events. You'll see it looks like stuff is crawling on it, those magnetic waves pushing through and some of them connect then and you'll see dark spots. Those
are the sun spots. You'll see some prominences, you'll see some filaments, you'll see the big loops are the coronal mass ejections.
What does that look like? A big loop? Like a bubble?
Yeah, what like a big loop? And I actually studied those last year during my summer internship with NASA, trying to get those physical parameters from coronal mass ejections during certain events, so trying to get how long it is from the center of the Sun, the angular with and all that good stuff.
So a coronal mass ejection also called a CME, this is a type of solar event, and what happens is magnetic fields kind of twist around each other and snap, and the Sun expels a bunch of plasma and magnetic field from its surface, which can travel to Earth in these big bursts, though with a CME it might take a few days for that coronal mass ejection to arrive.
Solar flares those are quicker and the most powerful explosions in the Solar system, and they emit light and particles and electromagnetic radiation that can reach the Earth and your face and your laptop in eight minutes. And CMEs those can affect life on Earth as well, including our electronics, but we have more time to see them coming. They move more slowly. Now, speaking of preparation. India is literally a week or two away from defending her PhD. This is a huge deal. She told me a little bit
about our dissertation. Are you this close to being a doctor or are you a doctor? I know that we were catching you like right in the middle of defending.
Well I haven't defended yet. So I just got the final edits for the full dissertation one hundred and thirty eight pages, so that will be going out to all of my committee members one Monday. So I am this close actually so exciting.
What's the title of your dissertation?
Advancing solar energetic part of cool prediction using survival analysis and cloud computing.
Oh my god.
And I'll be the first black woman to get a PhD in physics from GSU.
That's amazing.
So I'm making history with that. So my dissertation is three parts. First part is using pure statistics in order to analyze the time to detection of solo energetic particles once it reaches one of our satellites. And then the second part is using machine learning, and then the third part is the cloud analysis environment that I created using Amazon Web Services. It's free, it's open source.
So this is what India's dissertationists composed of. But looking upwards again.
What's the summer? So I think it was the musical group. They might be giants called the sun and the asthma of plasma free state of matter, not us, not lifically, not silent, And that's really what it is. It's a plasma. So the Sun is a big ball of hydrogen and helium primarily. There's a few other things in there that astronomers just all lump into metals. That's a weird thing
that astronomers do. But it's primary hydrogen and helium, and the hydrogen goes through a fusion process in the Sun's core to produce energy, and that's the source of all the energy coming from the Sun. Is this fusion process.
Fusion side note occurs in the Sun when the protons of hydrogen atoms smash and they fuse together to make a helium and they also release a ton of energy in that fusion process. And it takes four hydrogens colliding to make a helium. So helios helium, helio Sun. Do you get it? I didn't right before. Now, someone please tell me I'm not alone because this hurts.
So you have these positive energy blobs and these negative energy particles, and they are in this incredibly energetic soup where they are all flowing around. And when you have negative and positive energies that are separated from each other like that, you can produce magnetic fields. And that is the other major thing that drives the Sun. Are these currents of plasma causing magnetic fields. And that's really what
makes the Sun. It's plasma, it's magnetic fields. And understanding how those two things interact with each other is complicated. Then no, we're understand it to a certain degree, but man, there's a ton of stuff we just don't understand about that, how the plasma magnetic fields interact, even though the ingredients are relatively simple.
So, according to a NASA piece titled Understanding the Magnetic Sun, the surface of our solar body quote writhes and dances and it has more rhythm and confidence than you ali. Not the last part that's just an assumption. Now. This is because when charged particles in the Sun they bang and they move around, they also create magnetic fields, which just causes them to move more, just like a mash
pit of elegant stellar plasma. And when we hear always that we're made of exploded star stuff, but it's mostly helium and hydrogen with some metals. Now do those particles change when they leave that sphere or do those become sub atomic? I mean I realized that these are very perhaps not smart questions, but I might not be the only one wondering, So you know, now.
Oh no, no, these are great questions. So when Carl Sagan is just saying, you know, we were all stardust, that's literally true. However, there was a little little piece in there that you refer to, which is exploded stardust, and that is actually how you get the metals and the heavier elements out of a star is you have to go through a supernova.
Okay, heads up. A supernova is this giant explosion of a star. Huge, huge, huge, that's a supernova. And a nova is this transient brightening of a white dwarf star. We'll get to what that is in a minute. And it's burning off accumulated fuel. Novas that comes from the word new because it's this pow sudden brightening. However, I prefer this now antiquated Chinese term for novas, which is guest stars like ooh, solar system guest star. I love this nova excited.
Or nova in general. He doesn't have to be super you can just be a regular one. So in that process of a star going through its energetic life cycle and collapsing in on itself and either blasting out violently or just burping off its outer atmosphere, that's how you get all of those heavier elements deeper into the Solar system. It is that process, that process of the collapsing star, the process of the dying star, that produces those heavier elements.
You need those violent reactions to get iron, to get uranium, to get calcium, to get oxygen. I mean, that's how you have to go through that cycle. So the original stars are conceived to be almost purely hydrogen, and they had to go through a burn cycle to produce these heavier elements and get them out into the universe.
So the Sun has to go through some really intense shit to make heavy stuff, just like any true artist.
As far as how compact it is, we really don't know. You know, we have different types of stars. You know, we have white dwarves, black holes, or stars that have collapsed on themselves. So even black holes were stars, right and they're mad. Shrink shrink shrink, shrink shrinks, and then
it'll explode. Our star is a G star and it's right there and like midlife, So you have the early ones and then you have midlife, and then you have the Red Giants, and then you have the white Dwarves, and our son is just you know, if it was based on like human expectancy, you know, like thirty five or something, Okay, forty something, you know right around that age.
You know, what are those types of stars? Because I'm unfamiliar, but like you mentioned, all the way up to like a red dwarf, can you go up the line because I just don't know any of that.
So basically, it's the evolution of a star. Right starts really hot, then the outer it just starts to cool off, and then you start to go down into what we have, which is I think we're fifteen million kelvin and then it just starts the cool over time, but the mass is starting to crash in on it stuff at the same time, and then we move on to the Red Giants. Have you ever read The Time Machine?
No? I haven't.
You never read the book at the time? No?
Is it good sci fi?
It is the best sci fi. Yes, you have to read it. And it's not that long either. I think it's like at the most seventy pages.
I'll put it on my list. So yes, let's get that on my reading list. And if you're like hgh. So, Herbert George Wells wrote more than fifty novels and is considered the father of sci fi. Also, people called him Birdie, and he married his cousin, then they divorced, and he married his mother lady, and then he had like one million affairs on her. It's any of our business. But the Time Machine novella put time travel in everyone's hearts and minds, and also Birdie coined the term time travel.
So one day, maybe we'll all be time tourists, just walking around stinky old castles or poking at dinosaur poo and taking influencer photos in fits that are made from mammoth. We can only hope either way. Quick rundown of stars in case this makes you better at Jeopardy, I didn't
know any of this. Let's run it down. So our sun is a main sequence star, which means that it started as a clot of gases and dust and then it gathered more matter and started spinning and spinning, getting hotter and hotter, until fusion happened and hydrogens became heliums now. Main Sequence stars make up nine tenths of the stars in the universe, and our sun technically is a G type main sequence star, and the G is its spectral rating.
So you can be an O, A B, AN, A an F, a G OK, you can be an M star. O's are the hottest and the brightest, and M is on the cooler and dimmer end, so we're like a G. Right, we're in there. Now, what is a red giant star? This is a main sequence star that has begun to collapse, but the helium fuses into carbon and then that extra energy causes them to puff up until they dissipate and they become a nebula, which is like a cloudy space
ghost made of dust and gas. Our star will eventually become a red giant, but before that, a blown away red giant's core is hanging out, and that's called a white dwarf star, and that gets cooler and cooler and cooler and cooler. Now, a neutron star is super dense. It has an incredibly dense core and that's what's left after a supernova. After a star's hydrogen core kind of runs out, so it starts fusing heavier atoms like carbon and neon and silicon and iron and neutron stars again,
very dense. Now, if that neutron star spins really fast, you got a pulsar. Apparently some of these spin faster than blender blades, So you get your little fingies out of a neutron star for so many reasons. Now, red
dwarf stars, not red giant stars. Red dwarfs. Those are smaller main sequence stars, and when they release energy, it cools down and then it settles back to the surface so it can recycle and keep mixing like a cement truck, all the while remaining smaller and cooler and existing potentially up to fourteen trillion years. Red dwarf stars are like these modest stars. They live within their atomic means. They just kind of poke a long do in life under
the radar, like a turtle mining its business. Now, brown dwarf stars, ha, those aren't even actually stars. But they're bigger than our Solar System's planets, but at their core they're not really massive enough to do all that fusion and they barely emit light, no offense, and that's fine. Now, sometimes people refer to our sun as a yellow dwarf, but you should ignore those people because they are wrong people. So let's get back to our sun. Is it mad?
Is it stable? How close is it to just exploding and then everyone's dead.
We have a bit of time, it's about we're about middle aged. So the Sun's about four and a half billion years old, and the Sun will live to be about nine niche billion years, so we be about halfway through. As the Sun ages, its diameter will change, it will puff up its outer atmosphere a bit, so fortunately will be long gone by then. I mean, I certainly don't
expect to be around in a billion years neither. Yeah, the but the outer atmosphere of the Sun will eventually encompass the orbits of Mercury and Venus and Earth and probably out to Mars. As it gets older, as so many of us do, you get a little bit, you know, a little larger around the waste and the Sun is no difference. Yeah, And the Sun will actually puff out and encompass those inner planets, and it will those interpellans will fall into the sun itself as it's aging.
That means will get sucked in. So if the notion of this is terrifying and exciting, please enjoy our recent episode with doctor Robert Gamble on black hole theory cosmology, which covers such things like we don't really fully know what's happening in the universe or what will happen in the future. What the point of life is? I guess if you really zoom out, are we divine consciousness embodied in what little sacks of love? Are bugs that invested paradise?
Don't ask me do you ever have existential crises? Or are you over it?
No? I mean not about that, but you know, no, I mean I think the thing that I really love about astronomy and thinking about the Sun and in so many different ways, is it's all cyclical. It's all cycles and understanding that the cycles came before you to create you, and then eventually the cycles will end, and the cycles will continue and you won't be here, but the cycles will continue. It's a little bit calming in a way.
It's not quite so terrifying as you know it's you're going to be wiped out tomorrow by an asteroid that might be terrify, more terrifying than the Sun's eventual death.
First, let's get some further humanoid background. How did these two big, energetic, powerful brains study such a big, powerful ball of energy? And what about your cycle to get to where you are? How did you end up a heliologist? Akaa, heliophysicist, which we're blowing both terms up right now, But how did you end up studying this.
By accident?
Really? Okay?
Yeah, being a heliophysicist does not seem like something even stumble into. But do elaborate, Okay.
Yeah. I went to a small liberal arts college, Whitman College, out of high school, and it was a very interesting in astronomy. Loved the idea of the universe and dark matter and all of those fun exciting topics. And I was moving into the dorms my freshman year and I was assigned a roommate and his dad was a heliophysicist at Stanford, and I remember meeting him and thinking, man, your job sounds terribly boring. And so that was my first interaction with ialy physics, and I thought, boy, this
job sounds really boring. So went through my undergraduate degree and still loved astronomy. And got a double degree in physics and astronomy, and then didn't really know what I was doing with my life. I moved back home with my parents and worked as a caterer. Me too, I worked as a I did landscaping, yeah, just picking up odd jobs. And after about six months of that, I realized that A I wasn't entirely happy with this life
living at home with my parents. It's not what I aspired to and B I felt like I was wasting this four year degree. I just got like, what am I doing with my life? So that was a little existential crisis thinking speaking of criseses. But at the same time, I was, you know, blasting out my resume to anybody in my network that I could think of, and I was getting nowhere. I even remember cold calling John Mather, who is the recent Nobel Prize winner at Goddard Space
Flight Center, just because I wanted to. It's like, here's where I want to be, so maybe if I call him, he'll have some advice. And he was really nice. I say that that was amazing. Other scientists I cold called were not so nice, but he was. He was fantastic and again didn't actually give me any specific directions. So I decided to take a road trip across the country. And I was like, what, I'm not really doing anything.
I'll visit for friends. I'm just sort of frustrated. Oh man, I was in Tennessee and I got a phone call and it's somebody from Goddard Space Flight Center had my resume. Would I be interested in an interview? Like yes, Like I can be there in six and a half hours,
Like yes, I don't care what it is. And so I came in and reviewed to work with Stan Pesnell, who's the project scientist for this solar Dynamics Observatory mission, and he offered me a job doing some scientific programming, doing a little bit of science, and I just left at the opportunity. And so, you know, not what, five years after a meeting my roommate's dad, who I thought's job was terribly boring, here I am working at NASA Goddard as a contractor doing telyphysics.
I have a feeling it is not boring, especially not now when we've got an eclipse coming up in a couple of weeks.
This is probably the only time that everybody really is interested in Heliophysicists otherwise we sort of fly under the radar.
So yeah, well, I think that everyone just doesn't understand that the sun is to be understood. It's also solar flarees. When there's a solar flare, it's gonna kick your network off. Everyone's like cold call in heliophysicists being like what do I do? What's going on? But that's amazing that you ended up there, and also that you had the gumption to call around and say, hey, anyone got any advice like that? You could just call Nobel Price Laurian and
be like, hey, extension four two five? What's that?
So?
I mean, I have to say that sometimes being naive actually is a good thing, because looking at back at it now, I was like, wow, that was really ballsy of me. But I didn't I didn't really think anything of it. It was just like, well, I don't know what else to do. Here's a cool guy that I'd love to talk to. So sometimes just being naive and taking a risk, you know it days off.
I asked India about her background and how she became this rising star in heliology. Did you always know that you wanted to go into something astronomical because I know that you're you have a focus in math, you have a very good math brain. So when did you turn from math to the math of the cosmos.
Well, I always loved astronomy and physics and especially the computer science as more of a hobby or something that I did on the side, or something that I really loved. So I would get like astronomy magazines, you know, physics today, those types of things, and I really didn't think that there was a direct avenue into physics and astronomy academically. It wasn't until I got in touch with my alma
mater at the time, GSU. Their astro informantics group was looking for a statitician to try to help them predict solar flares, and I was like, hey, I'm a statistician, maybe I can help. And then they were like, yeah, you sure can come on in. And then I started working with them and helping them do research with NASA. And then my advisor, who wasn't my advisor at the time, he was like, you know that you can actually get
a PhD in this. Things are becoming more interdisciplinary because you know, you have this idea that things are math, physics, computers, you know, just hardcore but since computers started seeping into things, things started to become more interdisciplinary. And he was like, hey, you do know that with your math background, you can like seamlessly go into damn near any branch of science that you want with that math foundation, and we need you here, so you should consider it. And I was like, well,
damn okay, yeah, let me try. And then I was accepted to GSU to get a PhD in astronomy. I started in astronomy, oh okay, and I moved over to physics. And that story shocks people, yeah when I tell them that transition from astronomy over to physics.
So yes, even heliologists may not have a clear eight minute path from where they started to where they landed, which means none of us have to fulfill that expectation. Get the haircut, shoot the shot, figure out what you like, and you're good at No one's watching but you and you have this tiny tiny slice of time in that body of yours under the sun to make it fun
and weird, maga weirder. So many existential crises are being fixed right now, but all eyes are well, hopefully not directly on the sun, but are also on what you do so the eclipse is coming up. Did you see the twenty seventeen eclipse.
I did. I saw it in Central Oregon. I led an outreach group for NASA Science in Madras, Oregon, so a small town in central Oregon got beautifully clear skies. Fortunately I scheduled it so I wasn't actually working during the eclipse, which was the best decision ever, and was able to just be in a field with family and friends and watch the eclipse. And it is absolutely stunning. There really are no words to fully describe it. Did you see the twenty seventeen eclipse?
You know what? I didn't. And I had friends, a bunch of friends, scientists, friends whoms I love, all took a road trip and at the last minute I didn't go because I was working on this podcast called Ologies. It was like two weeks before we launched, and I missed it. And so it's been my dream since twenty seventeen to see it because my friends, even skeptic friends, were like it was the most surreal feeling to watch
one of them. My friend doctor Carro Santa Maria was covering it for nat GEO, and she said that she was alive covering it and started crying. Fade, fade, We're here.
Here come the bailey beads. Now we can look at it.
Oh my god.
Where it is.
Wow.
You can see the stars.
You can see the planets.
Oh my god, you guys, I'm actually crying.
This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my entire life.
What is that experience?
Like it is? I mean, it is all of that in that seeing a total solar eclipse is in terms of awe factors, people rank it just below seeing their child being born. So it's that level of deeply amazing and you don't quite understand what's happening, but it is really significant. If you saw a total solar eclips you'd remember it. It's not something that you're not quite sure if you saw it or not. You probably saw a partial eclipse, and partial eclipse is neat. An annular eclipse
is pretty cool. A total solar eclipse is something you tell your grandchildren about. I mean, it is orders of magnitude scale different between the experiences. Personally, I would say it is the most amazing on inspiring natural event you could witness. So you know, if you go to see Grand Canyon or the Redwood forests or any of those other spectacular like makes you feel small amazing feelings. This one is two three times better than that. I mean, I cannot overstate it.
Okay, so more astounding than the Grand Canyon. And maybe you're offspring being born, depending on how honest you're being. I don't know. I don't have kids, but I do have a picture of myself standing giddy at Arizona's Chasm in the earth, went alone. I had a stranger take my picture. I loved it. So if you're getting jazzed about even watching a live stream, let's set you up with some lingo. Okay, So, a partial eclipse. During this the moon looks like it takes a bite out of
the Sun, but it doesn't cover it completely. And an annular eclipse is not an annual eclipse, which is what I thought it metaphirst. Rather, an annular eclipse is ring like, so annular shares an etymology with anus, And an annular eclipse is when the Moon covers the Sun, but the Sun is larger in the sky than the moon, so
there's a large ring around it. Now, a total eclipse is when the moon obscures the full Sun and we only see a little bit of the Sun's corona, which is that roiling upper atmosphere of the Sun, and it looks like a glow around this silhouetted moon. Now Bailey's beads, hmm, that sounds fun. They are. They're twinkly little spots around
the corona. So as the Moon almost reaches totality, and through these little twinkles, they're caused by the rough terrain of the Moon's surface, letting some extra chunks of sunlight shine in through those mountains. Now, the diamond ring, that's a solitary Bailey speed and it shines like a diamond ring, of course, but it's more expensive to behold, depending on your hotel prices. But the diamond ring shows up right
before totality. Now, the stages of a total or an annular eclipse are stage one, when the Moon just first starts obscuring the Sun with just a tiny bite. Stage two is when the Moon is just about eclipsing the whole lass sun. Totality is when it's at maximum coverage, and then the third stage is as it's leaving. The fourth is when there's just a tiny bit of moon over the Sun. Now, the umbra that's the shadow you're
under during that total eclipse. But as you go out from that center point the umbre and you just see an eclipse is partial because of your angle relative to it. That's called a pen umber and it means almost shadow. Also, did you know that watching an eclipse can get you shadow band only, and that there are these rippling light effects that might shimmer up surfaces and on the ground between the first and second contact and after the third contact.
Those are called shadow bands. Gotcha, They're just called shadow bands. Now in terms of the other shadow bands, I don't know why your algorithm hates you. That's a different episode. Actually, specifically it's tech Topology with Hank Green, which we did and I'm gonna link of the show notes. Okay, So eclipse wise, those are things to look out for if you get yourself under the umbra of a total solar eclipse.
Life altering. I hear mesmerizing existence affirming something you can experience for a few minutes that contextualizes the fragility of life in the expanse of the cosmos. And I'm so excited it real Like I was just sitting here hout with so many questions. It really makes me wonder big questions like how is traffic?
It wasn't awful, No, it was okay. I didn't have the worst time because I was anticipating terrible traffic, but it was pretty rough a lot of places.
Because I missed it. I have had a dream to see it for the last seven years, and so just a few weeks ago, I decided to just bite the bullet, and I'm going to Caerville, Texas, which is two hours outside Austin. Okay, what if I missed my flight? Am I sad and screwed for one thousand years?
So in twenty thirty three, there is the next solar clips that will hit the US, but that's the north slope of Alaska, so about the Arctic Circle, so it'd be a trip anywhere in the continental US. Is twenty forty four, and that is going to hit just a small little bite of Montana, North Dakota, so again pretty remote. You'd have to make a real dedicated trip to see
it in the continental US. So yeah, it is going to be a while until we actually get a good chance in the continental US to see a total solar eclipse.
Non North Americans, I see you. We're going to have more on global eclipses and a little bit hangtight. Also, I'm sorry for all the miles and the Fahrenheits too. It's embarrassing. And now in eclipse we've got the Moon comes in blocks the Sun. What do you study? Also? Are you looking at the coronal ejections during an eclipse? How do heliophysicists approach this?
So eclipses historically have been life altering in terms of being able to see one for scientists. And I mean that not just like it inspires a lot of awe but it has you know, historically been the source of confirming Einstein's theory of relativity, discovering helium, I mean like those level of discoveries. And now the science that we're doing is much more focused on that Sun Earth relationship, is understanding the relationship between the Sun and how the
Sun influences the Earth. So the science that NASA is doing for the total solar eclipse both focuses on the corona and looking at flows and how material moves out from the Sun, how the solar wind forms, all of those ideas of material moving off of the Sun.
So scientists will be looking at the Sun through instruments and they'll also turn their literal focus to Earth and not the Sun at the same time. Why point their gaze away from the Sun. Isn't that like turning around backwards at a concert? What are these NASA scientists kill joys? Knuckleheads?
Now?
And the other side of things is I'm studying the ionosphere, the upper Earth's atmosphere that is partially ionized by the Sun. So the atoms in the upper Earth's atmosphere get some electrons stripped off by solar radiation and form a partially ionized plasma that covers all the Earth. Did you know you're living underneath a cloud of plasma? I did not, No, you didn't.
Yeah the first noos No one told me, Oh god, dive, wasn't see seed on that?
Yeah? It's not bad though.
And remember plasma is made of hydrogen and helium ions in a goop alongside electrons. And as stated in the paper the Earth's Ionosphere a wallless plasma laboratory, the Earth's ionosphere is plasma esque at altitudes above eighty kilometers. So above eighty kilometers we have something plasma like. And where are satellites in this mix? They're orbiting Earth at about one hundred and sixty to two thousand kilometers high, so at the shallow end of that ionosphere plasma like stuff
that surrounds Earth. Also. Weirdly, as I was working on this episode last night, I looked up and from my porch at sunset, I saw this huge glowing silver streak, and I realized I was watching a Falcon nine rocket launch, just cruising up like a Badminton birdie as casual as a lost balloon. And it was carrying twenty two Starlink satellites.
And if you want to hear more on that, you can enjoy our space archaeology episode on the space Junk and Garbage that orbits us with doctor Alice Gorman, which is linked in the show notes. But yes, how are these satellites affected by solar shenanigans?
I mean, like, if you're a satellite, it can be concerning, but if you're not in orbit, then you know it's actually been here our entire life and our entire existence. So the plasma can change depending on the amount of solar radiation hitting that diada ionosphere. So when the Sun is covered for a brief second, all of those processes that strip off electrons stop, and so there's a recombination. The nature of the plasma change in the ionosphere.
Okay, so plasma recombination, it's a little bit like it sounds. The positive ions in plasma bump into an electron or a negative ion and they're like, hey, oh my god, how are you? And then they head off in the sunset to go make a new neutral atom. And yeah, that reverse ionization in the Earth's ionosphere plasma can happen when the Sun is covered for.
A sec and then the Sun pops back out again and you can watch how all the ions change and then get reionized again the Sun comes back into view. So it's a really interesting natural experiment because you can watch all of this happen in real time and then watch how it changes and how it affects the rest of the atmosphere, how it moves out and waves across
the atmosphere. And so there's a number of science experiments probing the ionosphere to try to understand what are the specific effects on the Sun and how do small changes in the Sun affect changes in our own atmosphere.
And will helio physicists will they be hunkered down looking through instruments and running code, or do they set things up to observe and then they all peace out and go to the path of totality and then meet back up on Wednesday or whatever to look at the data.
Most people are the second type. A lot of our instrumentation are set to run automatically. We know where the sun is in the sky. It's big and it's bright. It's easy to find. So a lot of the efforts are getting all of the experiments set up now. And that being said, there are some real time adjustments that are being made.
Michael says. Some heliophysicists are launching a suborbital rocket mission to probe the Earth's honosphere and what will be a partial eclipse from their vantage point, but back down on Earth.
Though the majority of heliophysicists have their hotel booked three years ahead of time. I know exactly where they're going to be. They have their eclipse glasses and are just going to enjoy it.
What about you?
I will be in Dallas, Texas. So part of my role at NASA is to lead the Healiophysics Education Activation Team or NASA HEAT, and our job is to get heliophysics out into informal and informal learning audiences, so that's classrooms, after school, clubs, talks, and societies. So we are doing a big push in Dallas and we'll be at the Dallas Arboretum watching the eclipse and doing activities with kids and families.
And how many seconds or minutes of totality will there be there? And can you explain a little bit about why there's a path of totality and when it becomes partial versus total?
Is it dark?
Yeah? So they in Dallas. I think we're getting just about four minutes of totality, so that the path of totality is it's it all comes down to the spherical geometry of the Sun Earth Moon relationship. I mean, it is literally just how things are positioned in the sky. So the length of totality, how many minutes of totality you get, are based on the distance from exactly where you are, exactly where the moon is and exactly where the Sun is down to you know, down to the
inches or millimeter level. If you start walking perpendicular to the path, like as you're leaving the path, the amount of totality will start falling off quite quickly, and so by the time you reach the edge of the path of totality, the Sun is no longer completely blocked by the Moon from your perspective, and you get zero minutes of totality.
For this April eighth, twenty twenty four North American one.
Though the path width is I want to say, one hundred and twenty miles wide, So for in sixty miles ago from the exact right place to see that alignment between the Sun, Moon and Earth to give you four minutes where the Moon is completely blocking the Sun, and then sixty miles away you are exactly in the wrong place or just missed that, and you only see a partial eclipse. It's a deep partial, like ninety nine percent coverage,
but it's still just a partial eclipse. So it's amazing to think, like these are human scale sizes, Like you can drive sixty miles in an afternoon. It's easy to do. And that is the major difference between a partial and total. So eclipse is that position. So all of those relative positions and relative sizes of things in the sky all line up perfectly to be in that path of totality for that few fleeting minutes.
I'm so I'm so excited. I definitely feel like I have made the right decision to haul myself to Texas for this, Like I've been regretting it for seven years, but I feel like I'm due for another life changing every seven years, Right, I can have a little life changing as a treat. Can I ask you some questions that listeners have submitted?
Absolutely?
Okay, we got a lot of questions. We have two guests and a solar event on the horizon, so we're going to get to those questions, including the audio questions. You can submit if you're in the ologies, Pals, Friends
or BFF tire. But before we do, let's donate to a few relevant charities and one I hear that is doing amazing work is Astronomers Without Borders and April is Global Astronomy Month and Astronomers without Borders does sidewalk astronomy, online observation events, astro arts and crafts, and sharing of observational equipment via celestron and more. So to learn more,
you can go to Astronomers Without Borders dot org. And we're also going to donate to a cause in India's name, which is the Grady Memorial Hospital Health Foundation, which is based in Atlanta and whose mission is to work tirelessly to ensure that every individual in the Metro Atlantic community is guaranteed access to world class, compassionate healthcare, regardless of their ability to pay. And they are a Grady Memorial Hospital Health Foundation. So those donations were made possible by
sponsors of the show. Okay, your questions. First, one off is from Diana from Daniel Martin.
Good Hey, Ellie, Daniel here from Australia. I had a question about solar eclipses or is it a eclipses? What is the plural of eclipse?
Hmm, I've heard both. I say eclipses, but I've heard eclipses as well, so I prefer to say eclipses, but that might be in an American English thing.
So yeah. But main question, Daniel says is.
Total solar eclipses seem to have been quite uncommon here in Australia, at least from my experience. Is that actually the case? Are the places in the world where total solar eclipses are more likely to occur? And if so, why?
Oh yeah, this is actually a really fun question, So don't worry, Australia is going to get plenty of eclipses coming up here in the next decade, So yes, you've had not many, but I think in the twenty thirties or maybe it's like twenty twenty nine through twenty thirty nine, Australia is going to see something like three or four eclipses across the continent. So Australia is a great place to be.
Coming up Australia. I've never seen you in person, but one day I want to meet your wombats, I want to meet your kangaroos, I want to see your ologites. But you last saw an eclipse, hopefully safely with glasses, on the day of Our Lord four twenty in twenty twenty three. It's like a year ago. But if you missed it, you can mark your calendar for July twenty second, twenty twenty eight. Put a note in your phone as Sydney is right in the path of totality. And you've
also got a few in the next decade. November twenty fifth, twenty thirty July thirteenth, twenty thirty seven, December twenty sixth, twenty thirty eight. Put them in your phone. But if you miss the twenty thirty eight one, you better be in good health because you're gonna be waiting another thirty years for one in Australia. I know someone prone to putting things off. Don't pull them me. Get your tickets, Get book your flights.
Book your flights now, hotels, rental cars, yeah, just get it all done right now.
I cannot find a rental car in Austin. By the way, we were looking on Craigslist to maybe buy like a two thousand dollars a twenty year old car to use for the week and then just sell it before we go. We're like, is that legal? I don't know. Yeah, rental cars scarce in Austin. And now what about other continents? Do helu physicists today go around like solar storm chasing or clips chasing like tornado experts.
Yes, in a word, yes, I have a couple of good friends that will spend thousands, tens of thousands of dollars to see solar eclipses. This is their own personal money on personal vacation time. I mean, they're not funded to do a research project anything like that. It's just because they love them so much. So going to see a total solar eclipse is definitely about the journey as it is. I'm about seeing the eclipse itself.
There's a word for this, and it's umbrephile, meaning someone who's drawn to the shadow. So if you like eclipses, feel free to update that hinge profile. Nerds find each other.
So the next total solar eclipse after this one is in Iceland and Spain, which I think sounds like a pretty cool journey, so I hope to be in Spain in twenty twenty six. But more generally, clipses happen in the northern hemisphere a little more frequently than the southern hemisphere, and this statistically bears out over five thousand years if you look at five thousand years of eclipses and put all the paths on a map and stack them on
top of each other. NASA actually has a great visualization of this.
If you need a picture, I mosey on over to the NASA site five thousand years of Total Solar Eclipses, which featured a printable map should you need it. With more eclipses represented in lighter, warmer colors like a heat map, and the northern hemisphere, you are certainly favored to see them, And the NASA site says kind of jauntily a total solar eclipse can happen absolutely anywhere on Earth. In fact, there isn't a single pixel on the map that isn't
visited by at least one eclipse. They say, not a single goose egg in any of the fourteen point six million points sampled by the map. That's good odd over a long period of time.
The reason for this is the seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun appears slightly smaller in the sky during the summertime than the Southern Hemisphere southern summertime, So when you have the Sun appearing slightly smaller in the sky because we're a little bit further away, it's easier for the moon to line up to block the entire disc of the Sun. That being said, you know, on average, I think it's three hundred and twenty to three hundred and
sixty years between any one location having eclipses. So you know, if you're standing on the ground, on average, you can wait three hundred and sixty years between seeing an eclipse. I think in the Northern Hemisphere it's like three hundred and twenty years, in the Southern Hemisphere it's like four hundred and ten years or something like that. So it is more than a human lifetime.
Yeah, you gotta really take your vitamins. Oh, Hydrick, if you want to catch that, if you want to not travel. It's been eighty four years. So this next one was on the minds of patrons Olivia Lester, Kara Young, Rachel Kamara, Amanda l Ask, Bonnie M. Rutherford, Sam Gilbert, Megan Walker, shown, Thomas Kine, Tyra Peria. First time question asker is Dylan s and Claire Ritchie, as well as Jen Baker, who asked why how do sun farts flares affect us?
And?
Hi? This is Deborah from Placentia.
Can you explain the relationship between solar flares and sun spots? Thanks, that's actually a question. A sun spot is you can physically see a sun spot. It's like a black hole on the sun. It's like an actual black hole. A solar flare you can see in videos. It's an actual goddamn flare.
That's pretty cool, like a flame kind of coming off.
No, that's the CME. Well, I'm not gonna say first in sequence. We don't know if it's in sequence. We know that the probability of a sun spot, then a flair, then a CNME being in sequenced is pretty high. Okay, I'll say that. But sun spot shows through the corona. It's a cooler spot there, Flair, it's the same spot, but it's flashing now okay. And then the cme huge bubble coming out of it, and that's a coronal mass ejection.
Yes, okay. And where does does the bubble like pop and yurb? What's in that urb?
Well, it's like a jump rope, so it's not an actual bubble. It's like a jump rope. It's like a cord and then snap sometimes, I mean well every time it will snap. It doesn't just stay there forever.
Does it floop around like one of those one of those gas station dancing socks.
Not from what I've seen, Not saying that it won't ever happen, but not from what I've seen. From what I've seen, it's just it. It's like a loop and then the plasma starts to fall down from the loop, and it's pretty cool to see. But we do believe that they are connected, but we don't have concrete proof that it's in sequenced spot flare seeing me.
Will these mess up your life or do you have to do that yourself? Jen's Girl Alvarez had a question about the Sun.
Hi, this is Jensquirrel Alvarez. I have a question about the Sun. What's the deal with solar flares? And why do they fuck up GPS and all that stuff? And can I just blame all of their prop on solar flares? I feel like I should be able to.
Oh yeah, So a solar flare is an eruption on the Sun where you get twisted magnetic fields on the Sun to the point where they actually break and reconnect with each other. So this is called magnetic reconnection. It's incredibly energetic Visually. You can think of it as like if you take a rubber band and you twist it too much. I don't know, Like I had one of those little airplanes growing up where it was a rubber
band driven one. You wind the propeller and if you got a little too enthusiastic, like I did many times you wind it too many times, the rubber band would snap and then it would hurt your fingers, and yeah,
your a little plane would be ruined. That is kind of equivalent to what happens on the Sun. So you get magnetic fields twisting and swirling around each other, and you get enough sheer, enough twisting in those magnetic fields where they actually will reconnect, they'll break and release a bunch of energy, and the amount of energy that's something like a medium sized solar flare releases more energy in a few seconds than all of humanity has ever used.
No rout. Yeah, so everything from fires, caveman fires all the way up to nuclear reactors, everything that releases more energy in that a few seconds than humanity's ever used. Wow, very energetic.
I checked into this and yeah, via NASA, the energy burped off from a solar flare can be ten million times greater than the energy released from a volcanic explosion. Is that not scary enough? Okay? NASA also whispered to me on one of its websites that the most powerful solar flares have the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs, enough energy to power the whole world for twenty thousand years. Solar panels bring them on to the Sun though a
solar flare barely notices, just a little blip. It's like telling someone who's the most gorgeous person you've ever seen, you like their kneecaps. They're like, okay, thanks solar flares not that big a deal to the Sun. But it's a good thing that we have pocket computers and heliophysicists that have Excel sheets to keep an eye on this.
Back in eighteen fifty nine, there were two amateur astronomers who happened to notice what is thought to have been a massive coronal mass ejection a CME on the surface of the Sun. And one of them was Richard Carrington, for whom the great solar storm known as the Carrington Event of eighteen fifty nine was named. The other guy was Richard Hodgson. He got a raw deal. Nothing named after him that I know of. That's just my opinion.
So okay, what was this? What happened? A few patrons had questions, including about the scale of it through our modern eyes, Bonnie and Rutherford, Kelly Schaeffer, Carrington Event enthusiast Tim and Cassidy McKee. So India told me a little bit more about this legendary space weather.
Have you heard of the Carrington Event? Never heard of that? Okay, you should look that up to This happened in the eighteen hundreds and it caused child what the head bag? Then the little Morse coal thing oh.
Yeah, I forget telograms.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll go with that. It caused issues with that.
Yes, this thing hit the Earth's magnetosphere hard, possibly because one right before it cleared the way via its own solar wind. But as a result, the telegraph operational systems were jacked, Sparks flew from some of the towers, some telegraph lines ran despite not being plugged into power at all. Now, the night sky all the way from the poles to the equator was streaked with auroras. These gauzy, pink to sometimes blood red tendrils described by one witness as quote
crimson fleecy vapors. And these appeared at much lower latitudes than one would ever expect from a geomagnetic aura, kind of a late summer light show that stopped us Earthlings in our tracks in eighteen fifty nine to stare up at the sky. And yeah, it also stopped some telegraph
operators in their tracks because they were zapped into unconsciousness. Now, I was reading through this paper the Carrington solar flares of eighteen fifty nine consequences on life, and I didn't see any mention of deaths attributed to the Carrington event. But of course, they couldn't have polled everyone. Now. It did note, however, that the US press of the time indicated some anecdotal incidences of abnormal behavior, like an increase in public drunkenness in New Orleans. Let them party, it's
an event now. It also continues that the only statistical anomaly which could be found is an increase in birth rates in Paris nine months after the Carrington event. Hey, is your romantic connection electric or is it just the actual atmosphere lavian rose colored sky? Perhaps so. Now when we refer to a Carrington class event, it's like, who that's a big boy. Now. As for Richard Carrington himself,
life did not pan out in his favor. I checked out this book The Sun Kings, The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began by Stuart Clark, and it details that beneath the veneer of Carrington's scientific success was the consuming rot of family duty.
He inherited his family's brewery, which consumed most of his time just logging through it and getting to his astronomy passion, which was really good at just became harder and harder and harder, and he applied and was passed up for a job at Cambridge because of some office politics. And then his wife was found dead in her bed of a sedative overdose, and he was kind of low key blamed for it, like maybe he killed her, but people
said he didn't. And then he died alone in his mom's house, locked in a room, shortly thereafter, of a sudden brain hemorrhage, though the room was littered with empty bottles of the same sedative that killed his wife, Rosa. So he in his will gave two scientific societies two thousand dollars each. That's a ton of money, even though one didn't even acknowledge him after his death. Can you believe that?
Rude?
He also asked to be buried his favorite observatory spot on a hill, but his mother was like nah, and just chose to bury him elsewhere. But above his grave is an inscription in Latin that says, thus do we reach the stars? So in death he is remembered and his life and the Carrington event is said to have birthed the whole new interest in space weather. Also really thinking about Richard Hodgson, the other amateur astronomer, I think
he got off just fine. Now, what if you want to see an aurora without it being a gigantic, unpredictable sunstorm. So you patrons had aurora spotting questions such as Shannon no Grady, Eileen Lands, Matt Thompson, Cool, Nickstar, and first time question asker Ashland Noble, and Michelle Cabrera who wrote in a few years back, my husband and I drove to the northern ass end of Finland to see the
aurora for my birthday. Only, just as we were getting packed and ready to go, hubby happened to check out solar activity for that year and month and found out that we were at the bottom ass end of the eleven year cycle of solar activity.
Boo.
But we did manage to see some northern lights and we thought they were amazing. But we were so little bummed at the idea of minimal northern lights. So a little advice. Some say that the best place to post up is in the upper northern hemisphere at the time of the spring and the autumn equinoxes, with October giving a better shot at clearer skies. Now we're at a
solar maximum, all right, we're solar cycle twenty five. It peaks in July of twenty twenty five, so you have an even better chance at catching a glimpse of auroras, which are solar flares and CMEs those coronal mass ejections. Michael explains.
So what happens is there's a ton of radiation that gets blasted off there, and I mean like X rays, ultraviolet radiation. If it's really big, you'll get to see some visible light coming out of it. And it's just all this high energy radiation rushing towards the Earth. And what can happen is it can a change the ionosphere, so it can disrupt signals passing through the ionosphere. So GPS satellite it's in orbit, its signal passes through the
ionosphere and comes to your phone. When that ionosphere is disrupted, those signals can get moved around and you can get you know, your uncertainty on your GPS goes from a few feet to you know, a half mile or something like that, so you can get lost. It can say you're someplace else. Yeah. The other thing is with chronal mass ejections, they're sometimes related, sometimes not. So that's when a whole lot of plasma comes off the Sun. This is a big burst of electrons, protons and neutrons all
in this magnetic cloud. It comes racing off the Sun and that can actually impact satellites itself. So the electronics on satellite, and you know, you have a bunch of free electricity just floating around in magnetic fields. It's not so great for sensitive electronics. Every time there's a big solar storm, there's usually a satellite that is tough coming back online again. So that's that's really the other effect.
I don't know if you could blame all of your problems on solar flares, but I mean it's not a bad excuse. If you got lost on the way to the grocery store or to your office or something like that, Yeah, you could probably blame solar flare.
I'm gonna blame I'm just gonna blame solar flash everything, if that's okay. Thanks so much. Many of you had solar storm anxiety, and I'm looking at you. Chryslis, Ashton Edward, Rice, Anna Thompson, Kendall, am Andy Townsend, Earl of Grahamiltan, Aurora Cullen, first time question Master's Pachcha, Domino Cone and Claire Richie who asked, how scared should we be of solar flares? Eke I asked India. She did not mince words. Okay, and now what can we do to prepare if we
know a solar store is coming? I mean other than sunscreen?
Yeah?
I don you think we could do do? But a tinfoil hat? Does a tinfoil hat help?
Well? We know it's common mm hmm. We can build things so that it's harder to penetrate through, you know, just like if a tornado's coming, What can we do prepare? Yeah, get your ass in the basement and let it do his thing, you know, like it's just like any other type of weather. We can't stop it, we can't prevent it. Yeah, we could just brace your fucking self.
Yeah, and I had.
To sound so, you know, but it's the sun. It's huge, it's huge, yellow and bright. Wait is it yellow? What am I talking about? I don't know. Patrons Christine Pisteine Eso Party, Alyssa, Gregory Matt Herschel, Mariann Breckenridge, Appolina Pinia, Megan Kelly, Charlie McKenzie, and first time question askers Katie Munos carry lincourt on behalf of May who is ten. Sorry about my swears. We do have classroom safe episodes called somologies, which are g rated. But everyone wanted to
know about colors. Alison hats Owl and siram Mans wanted to know why the sun were sung because in cyrus words, whose light is she shielding? We'll never know about the fashion secrets, but let's ask Michael about colors. On behalf of those other patrons.
So the sun produces all wavelengths of light, So every single wavelength of light there is from gamma rays all the way down to radio waves, so sun produces them all the spectrum of light that it produces, so it produces all those different colors. If you look at the visible spectrum, the visible spectrum of light from the sun peaks in sort of the pale yellow to yellow green color. So like right there, that's the peak of the spectrum. So that is the color of light coming off the
sun in sort of a generic case. But if you go into space and you take a picture like astronauts did when they were on the moon, the sun looks white. I mean it is a white color to not yellow. So the reason we see yellow is because of our atmosphere. Our atmosphere scatters blue light particularly well, that's the reason why the sky looks blue is because it scatters blue
light and kind of it scatters around and glows. And so when you take the sun sort of white light and scatter away some of the blue, the shorter wavelengths and it moves it from sort of a white color into a little bit more yellow orange color. So that's why we see the sun as suncolored.
Why is the sun going night night on the horizon so pretty? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, weather scientist and sunset enthusiast Stephen F. Graffiti in a twenty twenty two article titled Simply the Science of Sunsets, so when the sun is low, like a daybreak or dusk in the sky, the path of sunlight through the atmosphere is longer, giving more distance for the blue light
end of the spectrum to scatter elsewhere. And he writes that a beam of sunlight that at a given moment helps produce this red sunset over the Appellachians is at the same time contributing to a deep blue late afternoon
sky over the Rockies. But la sunsets are gorgeous because our air is full of soot and cancer, right, not so big ol'd flim flam Sunsets are actually generally muted by these large aerosol particles like pollution, and the typical, really beautiful sunsets usually involve clean air with low humidity, not a lot of moisture in the air, and the right kind of high clouds to catch the glow of the sunset and then reflect it downward. So patrons love
to sail, Nan and Charlie Mackenzie. I hope that gives your sunsets even more context for you to stare at. Do you think that's why we think it's on fire because we think, oh, flames are kind of yellow.
Yeah, exactly, But the sun is a whole lot hotter than flames, and so that's where it's a little bit misleading. But in you just simple terms, you look at a flame in a fire and you look at the sun and like, yeah, that's about the same color.
So yeah, okay, so that's the story on the hue. What about heat? Maria Ka, Rachel Fuller, Megan Morgan, Eric Clarson, Michelle Park and Kelly and Scarlette p. Just so you have this blazing number, burning a hole in your pocket. The Sun's core is about fifteen million degrees celsius are about twenty seven million in fahrenheit. That's the core. The middle ish layer, the photosphere is only about ten thousand
degrees fahrenheit or fifty five hundred degrees celsius. And then as you go up through the chromosphere it raises five hundred degrees celsius. But then for thousands of miles above the surface of the Sun, that golden crown, the Sun's corona, starts getting hotter again, up to one million degrees celsius or one point eight fahrenheit, so really hot, less hot,
really hot again. So that's some serious incineration. Can we harness all that energy to our advantage other than just growing and sustaining every living thing on Earth, which is what the Sun is already doing? Lexi Cable, Lynette Villa, Simone Francoure, and Figmunt wanted to know This next question is kind of a garbage question. Sweet chilly first time question asker wants to know, what if we built an enormous catapult on Earth and took all of our garbage
and launched it into the Sun. Once a month. Could this save us from ourselves?
Well, a catapult would be hard. You might be able to do like a trebuche. I don't know. So I understand the vibe of like, oh, we have a bunch of trash that we've created, let's just get rid of it. But I think that it would cause more harm than good because that trash has a ton of really useful resources in it. I mean, I know it doesn't seem that way, but those heavy metals that are left over in your batteries and all those things are actually useful in terms of sustaining life on Earth, and so in
a short term, yeah, it could be helpful. It would not be a recipe for keeping humans going on Earth, because eventually we'd get rid of all of the heavy metals on this planet and we need some of them for technologies. Yeah.
God, that's a good answer. Okay, that's good to note. We'll keep the garbage for now, I mean we.
Still have to do something with it.
For more on how much garbage our little species makes and where it goes and what we should do with it, and how much of your recycling is actually recycled. Please get your heartbroken and see our Discard anthropology episode with sanitation expert and NYU professor doctor Robin Nagel. It is the opposite of garbage. It's a wonderful episode. It's also fascinating. Now, let's talk about making atomic and sub atomic friends. So Lisa Huis, Ricky Gervitz, Mike Campbell, Marine Flood, Carlos Baracol,
Tiger Udi. First time question asker is to buy a g Daniel Beck and Donachello. In Donachello's words, asked if a person were to be thrown in the sun, would their atoms become part of the Sun's nuclear fusion reaction, thereby contributing to the light which feeds our planet. But on a less visual note, first time question asker Victoria Maslek wanted to know where does the Sun get its
energy from? Yea and what's in the center. Is it like a gobstopper, fantastic convention, revolutionize the industry.
You can suck them and suck them and suck them.
And I'll never get any smaller. Never, they said, don't think they do a few more tests.
Don't I think it's like a god stopper because it's really really hot, you know, talking about millions of degrees, and I don't think god stoppers are quite that hot. But the core of the sun is where you get fusion. You take hydrogen through a few different steps, you can fuse into helium. And that process of taking hydrogens and forcing them together, and that's why you need to have extreme heat for fusion, is that how do you force
these hydrogens together. Well, you get them going really fast when it's really hot, and then they eventually will slam into each other and you can get fusion. That process of fusion, it releases a tremendous amount of energy, and it's so much energy that it would actually blow itself apart if you just had the core of the Sun. So if you just had the solar core by itself,
there's enough energy being produced that it would blow itself apart. However, there's a whole lot more sun there than just the core. There's many other layers stacked on top. And the gravity of all of those other layers, all that other hydrogen helium pushing down on the core. It in balance between the energy being produced and pushing out from the interior of the Sun and the gravity pushing it into the
Sun to create this nice little stationary ball. And so that's why the Sun is the size it is, because it's a balance between the gravity pulling all the material in and the energy being produced at the core pushing everything out.
I asked India about this as well. I like to think of it like it's solid in the middle, and I have a feeling that it's not.
Well, all of the chemicals that we know comes from stars, you know that, right, Like when stars explode, all of the you know, hydrogen, helium, iron, all of that comes from an exploding star. Because what happens is nuclear fusion takes place. You know, our sun is mostly a hydrogen and helium and the speeds are so fast they crash into each other and it causes those heavier elements. So there is a core of the sun. Do we know, oh,
if you can stand on that shit? Probably not. I don't know if it's actually solid, But what I do know is that there are heavier elements inside that we can actually like physically touch on Earth.
All right, we need a whole episode on nuclear power, but quick aside. A few months ago, China announced some major success with a nuclear fusion reactor that acts as an artificial sun and it smashes atoms together to form heavier ones, which releases heat like the sun that can be used as a power source. And currently nuclear power plants use fission they're splitting atoms, but leaving this risk
for radioactive waste that can harm us in the planet. Now, by contrast, fusion based power appears to be much safer, cleaner, and using hydrogen from seawater as fuel could power humanity for millions of years if we all don't die first. Not to be sad about it anyway, exciting stuff. Also, in a few days, I'm going to be in Texas, where a lot of things are corganchuan except for the sun in the sky this time of year, thankfully, But when it comes to size, what about our beloved sun?
Not that it matters, but patrons Matt Soccato, Kara Young, Gig Knows, Wendy Miller, Scarlett p m A. B Ewen Monroe, Megan Morgan, Dave Cannon, and first time question asker Wendy Parson wanted to know how ours stacks up and how big is our sun compared to other sons? Do we have a tiny soun? Do we have a big sun?
It's pretty small cool. Yeah, we have. It's called a dwarf star, and the reason it's a dwarf is just where it is on the evolutionary spectrum evolutionary line as stars go. But it's not that big. Really, stars get a whole lot bigger than the Sun. That's a good thing that it's not that big either, because if we were around a more energetic star, it'd be a whole lot harder to sustain life, because the Sun is nicely,
a little bit active, but not crazy. It's not gonna, you know, irradiate the entire Earth every couple of years and kill a living things, which would be terrible.
So yeah, as it stands, our Son is about thirty three thousand times the mass of Earth and it makes up ninety nine point eighty six of the mass of our solar system. Well, what if it were even bigger? What if we did supersize it? Patron's okayist, mom's husband, Emily Stuffer, Pafka thirty four, Melissa Cool, last name, Ward GG knows, and first time question asker Colleen Chick. I wanted to know about the Goldilocks Zone, a very lovely
habitable range we happened to live in. If we had a bigger sun, would we need to be further out to be in a Goldilock zone.
Absolutely, yeah, to be in that ideal zone. But it's the unstableness of those magnetic fields, so that if you have a bigger star, you're going to have more energy produced in the star, which means that all of the events, all of those things that happen on our son can
be more energetic. Also, if you get small enough, you get these crazy convection currents where the materials pulled out from deeper into the star and pulled out to the service, which means you can get you know, really crazy magnetic fields, and they observe these and satellites of these crazy huge flares coming off of a star, and crazy huge, I mean like as much energy coming off of a flare as a star is producing at that time, So like the star will get twice as bright in the sky
kind of a thing, and like that's not really sustainable, however far you are from it.
Rachel Cash wants to know when the Sun and the moon cross paths. It's a kiss, isn't it. I bet it is, they say.
I mean it could be a kiss, It could be a dance too. I think it's more like a Yeah, it's more of a dance, more like a passing, a passing touch. They don't really kiss as much as like they just walk by each other slowly sort of maybe give each other the eye and then going. I don't know if that's flirty or because they don't like each other. I'm not sure about that. But yeah, it's less kissing and more just like, you know, passing each other, like ship's passing in the night.
Maybe we can't ship them quite yet. The last questions I always ask are usually what's your favorite and your least favorite thing about what you do? But because there's so much opportunity here, I'm going to ask you some people want to know Ken not for some question Asker and Meghan Morgan wanted to know what are the current mysteries about the Sun that heliologists and heliophysicists don't understand? Like, is there a mystery that vexes you that we don't We just don't know yet.
Yeah, well there are several. The one that is most frequently answered or held up then all that say what my favorite one is most frequently one is talking about the solar corona. What you'll be able to see during a total solar clip. So the solar corona is millions of degrees. The surface of the Sun is, you know, a few thousand degrees, five six thousand degrees. Why, how that's weird. It's like you're sitting at a campfire and you're walking backwards in the air is getting hotter? Like,
that's not how it's normally supposed to work. So there's plenty of energy coming out from the Sun to heat the corona. That's not the problem. The issue is how do you get the energy from the surface of the Sun into the corona in such a way that you heat it up to millions of degrees.
So, yes, the outskirts of the Sun hotter than the surface. Bonkers. Michael loves this fact, as do I. And I found this recent twenty twenty three study titled Polarization of decaleless kink Oscillations of Solar coronal loops published in the journal Nature, and it opens with this declaration that quote decayalless kink oscillations of plasma loops in the solar corona may contain an answer to the enigmatic problem of solar instellar coronal heating.
Huh so. A space dot Com article was titled Scientists may finally know why the Sun's outer atmosphere is so freakishly hot, and it tried to explain it to non heliologists like us, saying that the waves are relatively weak, but they don't decay in strength over multiple cycles, and they may potentially supply a large amount of energy into the corona over time. So by not decaying, the heat and the energy could be building up instead of cooling
down as expected. Folks are working on it, but now every time the sun hits your face on a warm summer afternoon, just think about those hot, hot polarization of decayless kin ostellations.
Heliologists are that's an outstanding problem. We have ideas, there are no conclusive answers yet, so it's a weird. One. My favorite is solar cycles. So the Sun goes through eleven year cycles from quiet where there aren't very many flares or sunspots, to very active where there are lots of flares and sunspots, which is kind of where we are now about every eleven twelve years. We don't know why exactly. I mean, we have some thoughts, but we
really don't know why, Why is it eleven years? Why does it go through a cycle, what's causing that to begin with? Is it that way forever or just right now? I mean, all those questions are still really outstanding on what is actually going on with the solar cycle. But it's been served by astronomers for oh, three d and fifty years now, so it's not like it's going away eleven years.
I wonder what's going on with that. I'm sure astrologers have a lot of thoughts about it. India mentioned solar cycles ups and downs. To me, the sun has moods India explain.
We do have solar minimum and solar maximum, so we're actually going into a maximum right now.
I believe what does that.
Mean where we have the most solar events? So it's no compared to the minimum. Yeah, we don't need that. It happens we ever eleven years. Roughly every eleven years is the solar cycle.
So it's an election year. It's like four years of a pandemic, Like, isn't that enough? We need an eleven year solar cycle?
Yeah, and you know it is a bipartisan effort, So I will say that space weather is a bipartisan effort, but we are going into a maximum right now, and we use time series analysis for you know, that's well, the solo cycles were figured out before we even involve computers.
So let's turn the spotlight to what brightens the days of these two heliologists. What's your favorite thing about your job or about being a scientist or being a heliologist. Is there anything that you just like love that gets you're excited.
I genuinely love all of it. I love everything about being a scientist. I love being able to discover things like Survival analysis is a statistical method that has its origin in medicine, and it's been used in finance and even been used in gambling and betting. So it's basically predicting time to an event. So it started as time to death, so you would have a collection of cancer patients and then you will analyze their time to death.
And this technique has never been used in space weather to detect the time to detection of soli energetic particles. So what I found is that survival analysis gives us the same outcome as any other method that we've used, which means that it could be viable. That's what's exciting about science. It's like, Okay, it's you know, not technically something new that I discovered, but this new technique can
be used in this field. Ah. And that is what's so much fun about being a scientists and then collaborating with other scientists, and then of course let's talk about the obvious working with people at NASA, you know, actually going onto a NASA base, actually getting a NAW that's the ID, and then being able to be a part of programs that people dream about.
You know, you follow your dream.
As for Michael's favorite factoid, patrons Daniel White, James Nance, Tiger Dy and Doug Stewart all asked what is your favorite fact about the Sun? What is something that you just wish everyone knew?
So I think my favorite, like little g whiz about the Sun is the the energy produce of the core. We talked about that earlier. Okay, So energy is produced in fusion and then it starts moving outward from the core of the Sun. It takes maybe ten thousand years ash to get from the core of the Sun to the surface of the Sun. And then it takes eight
minutes from the sun serves the Sun to our eyes. Wow, So that little photon you know, is born in the fusion, and then it keeps on getting scattered and reabsorbed move to other places because the Sun is dense and it's hot, and it's a very chaotic environment, but there's lots of
mixing and there's there's lots of activity going on. So it takes this random warmth is bouncing around for you know, years and years and years, all the way until it gets the surface of the Sun. And then once it reached that photosphere layer, that the layer that we see when you're using your safety eclipse glasses. I'll get there your solar safely, little reviewing gas. The layer, that layer that you see, the photon goes pretty much on a
direct path from there to your eye. And so when you see the Sun, that photon was formed thousands of years ago and then in a matter of minutes lands in your eye and then you interpret it as the Sun. And that little like that little factoid is just it's amazing because the sun is just bright in the sky and thinking about how all that light got to where you are just always always amazes me. And that's a fun one.
I love that it has been waiting in the wings sort of like and that it's just like it's yeah, like there's it's.
Yeah.
And any last advice to people who are planning to see the eclipse. I definitely got my eclipse glasses early, which is shocking that I did anything early, but I made sure to get them from a vetted source. I know that there's some fakes out there that can sizzle
your retinas apparently. Also, lest you think that these warnings are like that, don't cross your eyes for sec because they're gonna stick like that, or a watermelon seed can grow vines in your colon, this one has merit and it also has a name solar retinopathy or eclipse retinopathy, and it is a light induced injury to your central retina or macular tissue which can lead to a permanent loss of your central vision. And for more on parts of the eye, you can see the Ophthalmology episode with
friend and I expert doctor Reed Weynus. It's a good one. Now you need solar viewing glasses at a rating it's called ISO one two three one two dash two to be exact, to be safe. And yeah, there are fakes out there horrible, so check places like the American Astronomical
Society for Trustable Brands and Links. If you have time, hang on if you've got good ones in case another eclipse rolls by your sky in a few years, or if a friend needs them on their travels, because you want an eclipse to be life changing in a good way, not in a way that results in a lot of ophthalmology appointments, even if your doctor is cool. Like read any other advice.
If you do have the chance to use some eclipse glasses, you shouldn't be able to see anything through them except extremely bright lights, like if you have a halogen bulb or a flash on a camera. You can see that in the eclipse glasses, but nothing else like there should be should not be able to see any other lights.
So during a partial eclipse or even during the stages of two or three, you can hold up a calender and you can see the dozens of little crescent shaped shadows that the sun casts. And during this recent partial eclipse in La last October, Jared and I were walking Grammy and all the dappling of sun through the tree leaves looked hook shaped, so cool. You can also look for crafts using pinhole cameras, even a disco ball will throw scattered light in the shape of the eclipse. Sun
also sunscreen and water. Can you do that if you get heat stroke? There's too much traffic for an ambulance. Now what about psychological preparations?
And then, sort of on a personal note, I would say, because there's a high chance of clouds. It's springtime in the northern hemisphere and there is a chance that it's going to be cloudy, make the eclipse a more of an event. Get to where if you're going early, bring a picnic. I don't know, bring family and friends, go
to a party and do some fun activities. If it's clouded out, but it's still going to get dark outside, you can still observe the world around you and how that changes as the sun is obscured by the moon and it gets dark around you.
So I I hope that everybody sees a beautifully clear day that day, But you know, just to make sure that you don't pin all of your hopes and wishes and dreams on those few fleeting moments of cloudless skies.
That's good, that's very very good advice. Smart.
I mean, there's always Spain in twenty twenty six, and I hear that's really nice.
There must be little pods of people that travel together, like see in a couple of years, which is darling. That's great.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's sort of like I don't know the Grateful Dead. There's just following the.
Umber files assemble, aspiring umber files. Start looking for hotels for like twenty thirty eight, figure out a rental car. Now, let me tell you. I'm sure you're ticking down to the days when you travel, so you gotta start packing up your glasses.
Oh yeah, I have my binoculars, the solar viewing binoculars. I have my glasses. I you know, have all my NASA stickers to give away on the flight. You know, I'm really getting excited for this. Also, NASA will be doing a live broadcast. To check out NASA dot Gov or go to the nasta's YouTube page and you can see a live broadcast of the eclipse. Will have telescopes across the path, so if it's cloudy where you are, you can still virtually visit most Law Mexico or Torreon,
Mexico where it's likely to be clear. I will pop on and say hi, and then Dallas during the recording, so you can come here about the Dallas eclipse. And one of the anchor desks is in Curvill so you should go and check out the NASA events on the river Walk and Curvele.
I'll have to get myself a free sticker, lam I'm here there here, they're giving them out nice. I'm so thankful that you're able to spare some time and talk to me about this. I'm so excited about going. I'm so glad I'm going.
I am really excited to get the word out to all of your listeners. I know that it has been a buzz in my community for years, and so I'm always a little obstruck when i hear somebody like oh this is there and clips coming up like oh yes, It's like where have you been? But really it's a chance to celebrate that the sun, celebrate the Sun Earth connection. So I'm just really excited for everyone here to take a moment on Monday, April eighth and just experience as Sun Earth connection for yourself.
So ask bright people, damn questions because the explanations are stellar. Lama, thank you so much to almost doctor India Jackson, doctor Michael Kirk, and all the folks at NASA. Goddard who made this possible, including Abby Sarah. For more on our two heliologists and heliophysicists and their info and social media.
Those are all linked in the show notes. There's also a link to NASA's Total Solar Eclipse live broadcast for April eighth, and I'll be in Texas and I'll be back with a field trip episode of the whole situation? Am I going to be hitchhiking in the tumbleweed outer reaches of central Texas? We'll see now. For kid friendly episodes of ologies, check out smologies that's SMO, l ogi e s. Those are all linked at aliwar dot com slash smologies. They're in the show notes. They're g rated
shorter versions of ologies the classrooms safe. Also look for an exciting announcement about a change we're making on May sixteenth. We're at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali Ward on both. Ali has one l joined the Patreon at patreon dot com, slash ologies or get your ologies summer merch at ologiesmerch dot com. Linked in the show notes.
Aaron Talbert Adminsiologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts Kelly ar Dwyer makes the website, and while Dilworth is our scheduling and travel producer, Susan Hale is the managing director and also did extra research and a ton of fact checking. Jake Chafee is our assistant editor. Thank you, Jake, I'm sorry I said Chaffy last week. I'm mad at myself. Welcome to the FAM. Lead editor, who also assisted with research is the warm and bright
Mercedes Maitland of Maitland. Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I divulge a secret from my soul this week. It's that I have one hundred percent been a dufist in the past and looked directly at the sun during a partial eclipse by stacking like six pairs of sunglasses on top of each other. And now I know that's
not a good idea and I won't do that again. Also, when I was a kid, there was this incredibly way spookier than it needed to be Disney movie called The Watcher in the Woods and Aaron Talbert, your Ologies podcast Facebook group admin, who I have known since we were for we watched it together on several occasions, and Betty Davis plays a very creepy woman who lives in a
weird old house. And I guess. Also Kyle Richards is it Kyle Richards or Kyler Richard anyway is a real housewife of Beverly Hills, but was a main character as a child actor. Also spooky and an eclipse features heavily in the plot of Watcher in the Woods. And Okay, first off, they don't make scary movies for kids like they used to, because this one straight up scarred my soul. But it also made me eerily fascinated with eclipses. So I'm one hundred percent rewatching it before I had to
tell excess to see how it holds up. I watched the trailer like five minutes ago. Goosebumps, scared, actually scared. Watch Her in the Woods? Gonna rewatch it?
Ernie you with me?
I hope, so, Okay, be safe, don't stare at the sun. I'm asking you that, I'm asking me that, Okay, Field trip incoming, Bye bye, Pacadermatology, homeology, cry doo zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, pathology, tethnology, seriology, elatology.
What's going on?
Solar eclips