Sun's Beautiful Magnetism Captured in Stunning Eclipse Photo

When you block out the glare of the sun, usually invisible — and beautiful — phenomena pop into view. So when the moon conveniently slid across the face of our nearest star last month during a total eclipse, solar astronomers made sure they were in the right place at the right time.

And that place just happened to be one of the coldest and most extreme environments on the planet: Svalbard.

In this stunning photograph of totality, beautiful lines appear to stretch out from the moon’s edges. In fact, those lines highlight the magnetic structure of the sun’s corona that would normally be drowned-out by sunlight. This observation was made by a team of astronomers headed by Shadia Habbal of the University of Hawaii at Manoa who viewed the eclipse at the town of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago.

Located deep within the Arctic Circle, the international team, called the Solar Wind Sherpas, braved –4 degrees Fahrenheit (–20 Celsius) and polar bears to get this view, but the effort was worth it.

Using specialist filters on digital SLR cameras located in two locations (to minimize the chance of bad weather hindering their view), the researchers were able to detect the light emitted by specific iron ions contained within the solar atmosphere — the corona. Also, using a dual-channel imaging spectrograph, the motions of these ions could be detected, providing an invaluable measurement of the depths of the corona. As the corona is a magnetically-dominated region, a spectropolarimeter was used to measure the coronal magnetic field.

The results of this expedition are being presented today (April 30) by the Solar Wind Sherpas at the Triennial Earth-Sun Summit in Indianapolis, Ind.

This observation is special to me personally, having lived in Longyearbyen for 5 months in 2002 when completing my astrophysics masters degree. Svalbard is a hothouse of scientific opportunity and researchers from all disciplines flock to the isolated islands to study its unique biodiversity and geology. But my research didn’t focus on the islands themselves, it focused on the sun’s interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field and upper polar atmosphere, and the stunning aurorae this complex relationship generates.

My time on Svalbard inspired me to take my new-found passion for space weather to the next level, deciding to embark on a PhD in coronal physics that year. And interestingly, Shadia Habbal was one of my two postgraduate supervisors, with solar physicist Xing Li (at Aberystwyth University, Wales).

Read more at Discovery News