NASA will create artificial eclipses to understand everything in the sun!

The stars are beautiful, complex and mysterious. It was not until Cecilia Payne in 1925 to understand that they were made of hydrogen. It is surprising to think that we know today both and so little on the sun, the easiest star to study. Understanding your physique is however crucial, because its interaction with the atmosphere makes rain and good weather on earth, and its solar eruptions threaten our technological society.

One of the mysteries that prevents specialists from heliophysics from sleeping is the question of the temperature of its crown. This actually reaches a million degrees, while it is much more diffuse and distant from the heart of the sun than the superficial layer called photosphere which, it reaches 5600 ° C. There are mechanisms there, including a phenomenon compared to plasma rains, which are to be understood (see the video below for a magnificent rain of plasma falling on the Chromosphere of the Sun).

It is also in this crown that occurs The gigantic coronal holes that we mentioned a few days ago. Note that the solar crown was discovered thanks to a total eclipse, which will have its importance for those who are interested in the imminent Punch program of NASA.

Punch, or four new telescopes suddenly

The United States Space Agency is preparing to launch a mini-constellation of four satellites, whose mission will be to answer these questions:

• How does the atmosphere of the sun turn into a solar wind?
• How are the structures in the solar wind created?
• How do these processes affect the whole solar system?

Punch's scientific ambition is enormous. These new observatories will have to monitor our nearby star, from its surface to its most distant area of ​​magnetic influence, the heliosphere, which measures up to 20 billion kilometers (around 130 astronomical units).

A telescope the size of the earth and artificial eclipses

“For this project, there needed two types of instruments: one who looks directly at the sun, where it is very bright; And the other who looks in the distance, where his particles spread. The problem is that there is the earth between the two ”explains Nicholeen Viall, scientist of the Punch mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

To get around this problem, there are only two solutions: either send the observatory very far from us, like the James-Webb, which is very expensive, or build a telescope of the size of the earth. Or almost, because by connecting three telescopes in low orbit and respecting the principle of interferometry (like theEht For black holes), we obtain a telescope the size of our planet. With these three large fields, Punch will thus be able to unify our understanding of the crown and solar wind.

But this program will also have a fourth narrow field telescope, which can create its own total solar eclipses in order to clearly distinguish the shape of the solar crown, usually drowned in the blinding light of our star.

In the end, physicists hope to lead to a better understanding of the phenomenon of solar eruptions and boreal aurora, but above all better predict the risks for our technology (IT, electrical devices, etc.) threatened by these waves of rapid particles, including the puffs are practically unprodible at the moment.

The whole will take off on February 27, 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, at the same time as Spherex which we were talking about Few.