It all starts Saturday, Oct. 14, with an annular solar eclipse — often called a “Ring of Fire” eclipse, because only the outer limb of the sun will be visible when the eclipse is at its fullest.
And it’s a fine way to launch what NASA is calling the Heliophysics Big Year. It will be especially great for those who live in the pathway of the eclipse — a path about 125 miles wide, running from Oregon to Texas in the United States.
Next year, on April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will occur on the eastern side of the nation, along a 100-mile-wide path stretching from Texas to Maine. There are several kinds of eclipses, which occur when the moon is aligned between the Earth and the sun. In Delaware, a partial eclipse will be visible Saturday, starting at about 12:03 p.m. and ending by 2:37 p.m. The peak will be at about 1:20 p.m.
But what is heliophysics and why should anyone care? Heliophysics is the study of the sun and the way its properties and atmosphere influence space and planets, including Earth. The sun provides enormous benefits to Earth. It sustains life and provides light and heat. And far too much goes on with the sun to constrain this celebration to one year. So NASA’s event actually spans 15 months, including two eclipses, the sun’s solar maximum (when sunspots are the most numerous and solar flares are more common) and the closest approach to the sun of NASA’s flagship heliophysics mission — Parker Solar Probe.
The University of Delaware has multiple physicists, including William Matthaeus, Unidel Professor of Physics and Astronomy and director of Delaware Space Grant, Professor Michael Shay and Associate Professor Bennett Maruca. They are involved in major sun-related research, including Parker Solar Probe and the Wind and Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) missions. They also are involved in upcoming sun-related missions such as CURIE, PUNCH and HelioSwarm.
Also on Saturday, UD’s “Eclipse Chasers” team, led by Professor Edmund Nowak, chair of UD’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, will be in Junction, Texas, for a test launch of their helium-filled weather balloon during the annular eclipse. The team is one of 70 teams participating in NASA’s Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP). The team will launch its balloon again on April 8 during the total solar eclipse. Students have designed, constructed and assembled the balloon’s payload, which holds everything necessary to gather atmospheric data and what they hope will be stunning video footage.
UDaily asked UD experts for a bit of context on their research. Here are their answers:
What is the most exciting sun-related research you have been part of? What has been most surprising to you in that work?
Matthaeus: As a co-investigator on the Parker Solar Probe (PSP), I have been involved in the mission since the beginning. A main goal of PSP is to understand the origin of the solar wind, a supersonic plasma that pervades the entire solar system and establishes the neighborhood controlled by the sun. PSP is getting progressively closer to the sun with each orbit and is entering the solar corona, the region where we will likely find answers to the most important of these questions.
Right after launch (in 2018), we wrote a paper describing our theoretical explanation of how the magnetic field gets rolled up and reverses direction, in a phenomenon called "switchbacks.” We predicted that these occurrences would become less frequent and then disappear as PSP descended into the corona. So far this seems to be occurring! We hope to have conclusive evidence in the next year or so.
Maruca: Probably the most exciting work that I've done (thus far) in heliophysics has been the development of Parker Solar Probe (PSP), since it has been such a superlative mission. It recently broke its own record for the closest approach to the sun by any human-made object and the fastest speed of any human-made object (on or off Earth). PSP has become the first spacecraft to pass through the sun's atmosphere (the solar corona), which has provided us an unprecedented glimpse of the solar wind being born. PSP continues to return new data, but my students, colleagues and I are still analyzing and debating the data we already have — frankly, the community will probably be doing that for decades.