One hundred years ago this week, a total solar eclipse briefly blotted out the sun and gave humanity a new understanding of the universe. - NBCNewsMACH
“Einstein made this very insightful observation — that light ought to be affected by gravity,” says Daniel Kennefick, an astrophysicist and historian of science at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. That means that a beam of light will be deflected by a small amount, “and we ought to be able to measure this deflection.”
Making such a measurement is tricky. Most of the time the sun is so bright that it’s impossible to observe stars that lie near it in the sky. But for a few minutes during a solar eclipse, the, the background stars can be photographed and their positions can be pinpointed. Of course, total solar eclipses are rare, happening only about once a year and visible only along a narrow band on Earth’s surface. Complicating things is the fact that Einstein’s theory predicts only a tiny shift of starlight — comparable to the width of a nickel viewed from a mile away. Telescopes and photographic plates of the era were just barely capable of detecting such a small shift.
In the end, the weather was mixed. Skies at Sobral were clear. But Principe was covered by clouds, which cleared just long enough for Eddington’s team to obtain a few photographs before the eclipse ended.During the eclipse, two heliostats with movable mirrors were used to direct images of the eclipsed sun into a pair of horizontal telescopes. Measurement of photographs taken through these instruments was checked for any deflection of star positions adjacent to the sun.
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