This Sunday at 6am local time, people in central Africa will be treated to one of Earth’s greatest astronomical spectacles: a solar eclipse
THIS SUNDAY, June 21st, at 6am local time, people in central Africa will be treated to one of Earth’s greatest astronomical spectacles: a solar eclipse. The rising sun will dim as a black disc creeps across it, blotting out more and more of its light. The temperature will fall; the sky will darken. A minute and a half later, it will pass, and the sun will return to its original state.
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon moves between the sun and the Earth, casting a shadow over the Earth’s surface. Although the sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, it is also nearly 400 times as far away from the Earth, which means the two spheres appear about the same size in the sky. In a total eclipse, the corona, the cloud of hot gas that forms the sun’s outer atmosphere, can still be seen as a bright halo around the moon.
Eclipses have been watched since ancient times. Imperial Chinese astronomers catalogued nearly 1,000 of them from 771BC to the Ming dynasty. Because the sun, Moon and Earth move in such predictable ways, scientists can calculate precisely when they have occurred, and when they will do so again. Records of the “Assyrian eclipse”, which occurred in 763BC, allowed historians to align the Assyrian calendar with our own.
Annular eclipses slightly outnumber the total sort, and will do so to an ever greater extent. The peculiar geometry that causes the sun and Moon to appear the same size in the sky, thus making solar eclipses so spectacular, depends on the distance between the Earth and the Moon. But the Moon is moving away from Earth—by about 3.8 centimetres each year, on average—which means that one day it will be too far away from Earth to cover the sun at all.
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