Listen to episode one of the Sun + Eclipse Series from NASA's Curious Universe Podcast
Come get curious with NASA. As an official NASA podcast, Curious Universe brings you mind-blowing science and space adventures you won’t find anywhere else. Explore the cosmos alongside astronauts, scientists, engineers, and other top NASA experts who are achieving remarkable feats in science, space exploration, and aeronautics. Learn something new about the wild and wonderful universe we share. All you need to get started is a little curiosity.Discover more ad-free, original NASA shows at nasa.
JACOB: You’ll meet people obsessed with auroras and eclipses… voyaging across the world, braving icy blizzards and baking hot deserts to catch fleeting glimpses of our Sun’s power right here on Earth…PADI: We’ll take you into the path of totality for the otherworldly experience that is a total solar eclipse…
PADI: Our Sun is definitely just right for us, but since it is a star just like all the others… just lightyears closer to us… we study it here at NASA to both better understand how it affects us, and to better understand how stars elsewhere in the universe work. CHRISTIAN: And again, the Sun is putting off just the right amount of energy, photons, that bring light and heat to Earth, to keep our planet’s surface under the right conditions for life to begin.
We’ve had a long history of observing the Sun. It dates back, you know, before the United States had formed. But observing the sun from space has happened really since the beginning of the space age. And there’s been a lot of discoveries that have happened since the beginning of our spacefaring, you know, race.CHRISTIAN: Studying the Sun has sort of defined NASA’s history… understanding our star was a goal for space science even before NASA formed. So, there have been a lot of missions.
CHRISTIAN: Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to heliophysicists either, but it’s true! How it gets so, so hot is one of the Sun’s biggest mysteries. CHRISTIAN: Yeah, it’s well-named. But it actually gets even wilder than that. The second kind of eruption is called a solar flare.A flare is a very explosive event that basically sends off all this energy very, very fast in the form of generally light and high energy light to the Earth.And sometimes you get it where there’s a coronal mass ejection that has flares within it. Okay, but that coronal mass ejection travels much slower to the Earth, a few days.
PADI: And that activity is not always the same, right? We’ve mentioned early on that the sun is near Solar Maximum, right now in 2024.
CHRISTIAN: Yeah, I mean, there’s the potential for things to be pretty bad. But don’t worry, luckily, we have this built-in shield that protects us from all but the worst storms here on Earth.So, as you move as you get closer and closer to the Earth, you come upon this obstacle, which is the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s created by, you know, the rotation of the metallic core of the Earth, that sets up this magnetosphere, that’s our protective shield.
JACOB: That’s pretty cool… I still have one more question though. I mean, if the Sun is sending out the solar wind in all directions, all the time, I mean—only a tiny fraction of that is going to hit Earth. So, what happens to the rest of it? CHRISTIAN: Yeah, it’s pretty wild to think about. Near the beginning of the space age, we’re sending this message in a bottle out into the universe, expanding our horizons, way before all our modern Sun-studying spacecraft…
CHRISTIAN: We still really don’t know… there have been other missions that tried to detect its shape through remote sensing and there’s another interstellar mapping probe planned. But right now, we just have theories…And, and it’s interesting to think about, just like the structure, what does our heliosphere really look like?CHRISTIAN: OK so, there are basically two theories.
CHRISTIAN: Yeah, it really is. And it’s all just a little mind blowing to me. But that’s just the start. We’re going to get into so much more in the coming episodes.
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