Space photo of the week: A radio ‘ring of fire’ shows a solar eclipse as never seen before
source : www.livescience.com
What it is: Radio images of an annular solar eclipse.
When it was taken: October 14, 2023.
Where it was taken from: Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA), California.
Why it is so special: Scientists have captured the first radio telescope images of an annular solar eclipse’s famous ‘ring of fire’ effect – even though they were outside the eclipse’s central path.
On Saturday October 14, 2023, an annular solar eclipse was visible from a 120-mile-wide belt across nine U.S. states, including the northeastern tip of California. Owens Valley Radio Observatory, in Big Pine, California, was not within that path and so could only image an 80.5% partial solar eclipse, the researchers said. this interactive Google Map by the French eclipse cartographer Xavier Jubier. (Within the path of the eclipse, as much as 91% of sunlight was blocked).
Related: The best photos of the October 14 ‘ring of fire’ eclipse over North America
However, radio astronomers were still able to capture radio images of the “ring of fire” because OVRO-LWA detected the sun’s corona, or super-hot outer atmosphere, which was invisible to those watching the eclipse.
“From our observatory location in California we were not in the belt to see the annular solar eclipse, but we were still able to ‘see’ it all clearly via radio, which thanks to the radio shows a much larger solar disk than its visible counterpart. sensitivity to the extended solar corona,” Bin Chenassociate professor of physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR), who along with colleagues led the observations, said in a rack.
Radio astronomy is the study of celestial bodies radio frequencies, which are invisible to the human eye. OVRO-LWA’s proximity to the path provided a unique opportunity to study the Sun’s extended corona with the array’s 352 antennas, sampling thousands of radio wavelengths simultaneously.
“It was spectacular to finally see a ‘ring of fire’ eclipse like this… we have never seen this quality of radio images of the Sun before,” Dale Gary, a physics professor at NJIT-CSTR and co-investigator of the OVRO-LWA project said in the statement. “Normally we can’t see the corona from the ground, except during a total solar eclipse, but now with OVRO-LWA we can see it all the time. This solar eclipse makes it even more dramatic.”
The October 14 annular solar eclipse also passed over parts of Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia and Brazil. The next solar eclipse visible from North America will be a total of one, crossing from southwest to northeast on April 8, 2024.
source : www.livescience.com
