Ologies with Alie Ward - Heliology (THE SUN/ECLIPSES) with India Jackson and Michael Kirk

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Sunset flimflam! Auroras! Eclipse tips! Let’s get to know the center of our solar system, the Sun,  as the April 8th eclipse approaches. What is it made of? How big is it? Will it explode soon? Why can’t I stare at it? And why is it wearing sunglasses? Dr. Michael Kirk and almost-Dr. India Jackson are brilliant and charming Heliologists who have both worked with NASA’s heliophysics departments. Get to know them and also the giant hot plasma ball we revolve around. You’ll never (not look at it) the same. Follow Michael on Google ScholarVisit India’s website and follow her on Instagram, X and Google ScholarWatch NASA’s Total Solar Eclipse Live Broadcast on April 8, 2024Donations went to Astronomers Without Borders and the Grady Memorial Hospital Health FoundationMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Selenology (THE MOON), Cosmology (THE UNIVERSE), Meteorology (WEATHER & CLIMATE), Nephology (CLOUDS), Black Hole Theory Cosmology (WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?!), Discard Anthropology (GARBAGE), Tiktokology (THE TIKTOK APP), Space Archaeology (SPACE JUNK), Aerology (MARS), Quantum Ontology (WHAT IS REAL?)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow @Ologies on Instagram and XFollow @AlieWard on Instagram and XEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jacob ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh hey, it's your friend with too much stuff hanging from his rearview mirror, Ali Ward. Let's get started, let's dip into it. This one is about the sun. We got eclipse trivia and tips and dates tossed in. It's also a BOGO. It's a buy one, get one because we have two guests. Thank you NASA for both of them. And thank you to wildlife ecologyologist Corina Newsome for the intro to India.

So I'm going to be honest, we weren't even going to cover this ology right now. If we did, we should have put it out a couple weeks ago. I've always wanted to cover it, but kind of at the last minute I decided to trek to see the eclipse in Texas and I selfishly selfishly wanted to know how the Sun works because everyone's talking about it and because everything alive on Earth would be dead without it. It's a key player. I was like, let's get this done. So these two guests, one is a research scientist in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Now, the other has a bachelor's and a master's in mathematics and is on a cusp, cusp of totality in regards to her PhD in astrophysics from Georgia State University.

She's self-taught in 10 computer programming languages. She studies solar energetic particles, coronal mass ejections, and has had multiple internships with NASA's Helio Analytics Department at NASA Goddard. And these are the folks you want to talk to about the Sun. And we will in a sec. But first, thank you to all of our patrons at patreon.com slash Ologies, who for one dollar a month can submit questions before I record. And thank you to everyone wearing Ologies merch from Ologiesmerch.com. And for $0, thank you for supporting Ologies just by leaving reviews. And you know I read them all.

And to prove that, thank you to Veryfarfromthemadingcrowd, who said that Ologies is like a cuddle from a friend and a hug from the universe and a tickle fight for my brain. And Veryfarfromthemadingcrowd said they put off writing that review for the last five years. So thank you. It's worth the wait. If you've left a review, I've read it. Now, heliology. Helios straight up means sun in Greek.

But the word eclipse, I just found this out, comes from the Latin for a failure to appear, which sounds kind of like the sun is in some hot water with the judicial system. But in this episode, we're going to shed some light on what the sun is made of. Is it fire or not? How old is it? How big is it? What is the surface of the Sun look like? When will it implode on us? What rays are coming off of it? What is a sunspot? A solar storm? An eclipse? An

ejection of coronal mass? Are our electronics safe? Also, where can an eclipse happen? Should you go see one? Is it that big of a deal? What happens if you step out and stare directly into the Sun? So get to know the center of our solar system with heliologist Dr. Michael Kirk and almost almost just days away from defending, so I'm declaring it here, Dr. India Jackson. Let's hop right in and meet Michael. My name is Michael Kirk.

My pronouns are he, him, and his. And now we were talking about onomies versus ologies. You study the sun, so technically you are a heliologist. Has anyone ever called you that or no? No, you're the first person to ever call me a heliologist. We typically call ourselves heliophysicists or solar scientists or something like that, but heliologist. No, never heard that one before, but thanks. Heliophysics is actually a relatively new term. It was sort of coined back in the late 90s, mid 90s. So in terms of the way science goes,

this is still a very youthful idea of heliophysics. Because what it used to be is solar science, you know, studying the Sun and then you study space and then you study the Earth's upper atmosphere. And they were quickly realizing they're all related with each other. They're all, you know, part of the what we call the heliosphere. So that's where heliophysics came from. And so even the word heliophysics is not very well known in scientific communities, let alone the general public. But we're sort of on a mission that, you And so even the word heliophysics is not very well-known in scientific communities, let alone the general public, but we're sort of on a mission that, you know,

five-year-olds know Tyrannosaurus Rex, that's a hard word. So we should know heliophysics as well. I had no idea that it was a newer term. This is exciting. Yeah, about to launch it. What exactly is a heliosphere? I don't think I've ever heard that term before.

Yeah, so heliosphere is everything the sun touches. That's the sort of easiest way to describe it. So the Sun, of course, is the source of all our light and heat on Earth, but it also is pushing out radiation particles. There is a reasonably well-defined boundary where the influence of the Sun pushes out into interstellar space, and at some point the other stars in our galaxy are pushing back and so there's a boundary that the Sun's radiation influence in a bubble and that's called the heliosphere and so all of the planets are inside the heliosphere. The only things that we know of that are outside of the heliosphere right now are the Voyager spacecraft. They actually cross the boundary are now in interstellar space. So just a quick aside, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probe crafts, they were

launched in the late summer of 1977. They have both crossed interstellar space beyond our Sun's heliosphere in 2012 and 2018 respectively. And Voyager 1 is about 24 billion kilometers or 15 billion miles away. And Voyager 2, after cruising past the gas planets of our solar system, is now roughly 20 billion kilometers or 12 billion miles from Earth. Meanwhile, I can't make it past an eight-hour road trip without stopping five times to pee and three times to purchase truck stop coffee. Also, Michael says that they're having like a few communication issues with the voyagers, but I'm sorry, they're communicating from several billion miles away.

Give them grace for not returning your text, NASA. Calm down. So these voyagers, they're voyaging away tens of billions of miles. And just for scale, distance-wise, the Sun is just a mere 93-ish million miles or 150 million kilometers away. That's right in our galactic backyard. And now, if we can see stars distantly, we're not in their heliosphere though, right? We can just see pinpoints of light. How do you determine if you can still see something? Oh, wow. If you can still see something?

Oh, wow, if you can see something. Well, so the sunlight, like all light, falls off exponentially. So every two meters you move out from an object, the light falls off to four meters, or to four times the amount. So it's exponentially decreasing. So as you move away from the sun, its brightness is limited limited and eventually you need bigger and bigger telescopes or bigger and bigger apertures to be able to see that increasingly faint starlight. I mean, that's why we launched, NASA launched James Webb was to create a really big mirror in space to capture really dim objects. And so in terms of the sun's influence, the radiation pushing out from the sun, there's

light that is going to go off into space pretty much forever. But there is a defined boundary of that solar wind flow that flows out from the sun and provides a fluid pressure. So like a pressure of, you know, you put your hand in front of a water spigot and you feel the water pressure and it's a whole lot less from the Sun, but there's a pressure pushing out. So that's what we define as the edge of the Sun's influence. So each star has this bubble around it of where it is completely dominant. It's pushing out all of the other stuff from the universe and in defining this protective

or captive bubble around it. And then depending on how big the star is, how bright it is, how active it is, those size of those bubbles change of the heliosphere itself. And so that solar wind is just a term for how it's putting pressure on other things. Are you ever mad that it's called wind? Is that so confusing?

No, actually, it's a great term because solar wind gets you to sort of think about a little bit of its weather too. So there's their space weather as well. And the solar wind is sort of the, it's always there, wind blowing out from the sun. By wind, I mean these are particles, magnetic fields, so protons, neutrons, electrons, magnetic fields just always being pushed out from the sun all the time. And this wind is carried out in streams and in clumps and in blobs and is pushed out. But calling it wind makes you think like, oh, that must be some sort of weather phenomenon.

And that's exactly why it's a really good term because space weather is the changing environment in space caused by the sun. And so astronauts deal with it, satellites deal with it. I mean, planets deal with it too. Our earth and upper atmosphere changes depending on the space weather conditions. Oh, okay. I thought you were going to be like, yeah, it sucks. They call it wind. I got to really try to explain that when it's career day. Yeah, there are other terms I think are terrible, but that's not one of them.

What else is terrible? Can you smell any beans? I think the hardest thing is that we use the term solar system to just talk about the planets. Okay, so you have the planets in the solar system and everybody learns the solar system and you learn the names of the planets, but the solar system, if you like think about the words, it's about the sun and the relationship between the sun and the planets. And so I think the term solar system is great. I just wish we could like include a little bit more sun in that solar system description instead of just talking about Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. That's such a good point. It is called the solar system and I feel like I know the least about the Sun and

This is a great time to help me actually visualize it. So the Sun is it a huge ball of fire? Is it plasma? Is it just a light? What is the Sun even made of do we know? Yes, okay. Okay. Oh, no next question. Oh no Yes. Okay. Okay. Oh, no. Next question. Oh, no.

He's kidding, but also not. Let's check with another NASA Goddard scientist, India Jackson, almost PhD. Okay. My name is India Jackson. My pronouns are she, her. So let's say that you had to describe what the sun was or like how big it is. I have no concept of how big the sun is, like none. Are there just arms of plasma

that are giant coming off of it? Like I can't even visualize it. Well, you know, the solar dynamic observatory, have you heard of that? No. But you can see daily live images of the sun. And it looks like a ball because the gravity is pushing towards the center. So that. And it looks like a ball because the gravity is pushing

towards the center. So that's why it looks like a ball. And then you will get some solar events. You'll see, it looks like stuff is crawling on it. Those magnetic waves pushing through and some of them connect and then they'll snap and you'll see dark spots. Those are the sunspots. You'll see some prominences. You'll see some filaments. You'll see the big loops are the coronal mass ejections. What does that look like? Like a big loop? Like a bubble? Yeah. What?

Like a big loop. And I actually studied those last year during my summer internship with NASA trying to get those physical parameters from coronal mass ejections during certain events. So trying to get how long it is from the center of the sun, the angular width, and all that good stuff. So a coronal mass ejection, also called a CME, this is a type of solar event. And what happens is magnetic fields kind of twist around each other and snap,

and the sun expels a bunch of plasma and magnetic field And what happens is magnetic fields kind of twist around each other and snap, and the Sun expels a bunch of plasma and magnetic field from its surface, which can travel to Earth in these big bursts. Though with a CME, it might take a few days for that coronal mass ejection to arrive. Now solar flares, those are quicker and the most powerful explosions in the solar system. And they emit light and particles and electromagnetic radiation that can reach the earth and your face and your laptop in eight minutes. And CMEs, those can affect life on earth as well, including our electronics. But we have more time to see them coming. They move more slowly. Now, speaking of preparation, India is literally a week or two away from defending her PhD. This is

a huge deal. She told me a little bit about her dissertation. Are you this close to being a doctor or are you a doctor? I know that we were catching you like right in the middle of defending. Well, I haven't defended yet. So I just got the final edits for the full dissertation, 138 pages. So that will be going out to all of my committee members one Monday. So I am this close actually. That's so exciting. What's the title of your dissertation? Advancing Solar Energetic Particle Prediction Using Survival Analysis and Cloud Computing. prediction using survival analysis and cloud computing. And I'll be the first

black woman to get a PhD in physics from GSU. That's amazing. So I'm making history with that. So my dissertation is three parts. First part is using pure statistics in order to analyze the time to detection of solar energetic particles once it reaches one of our satellites. And then the second part is using machine learning. And then the third part is the cloud analysis environment that I created using Amazon Web Services. It's free. It's open source. So this is what India's dissertation is composed of. But looking upwards again.

What's the summit? So I think it was the musical group, They Might Be Giants called The Sun and the Asthma of Plasma. Electrons are free of our state of matter, not gas, not liquid, not solid. And that's really what it is. It's a plasma. So the sun is a big ball of hydrogen and helium primarily.

There's a few other things in there that astronomers just all lump into metals. That's a weird thing that astronomers do. But it's primary hydrogen and helium. And the hydrogen goes through a fusion process in the sun's core to produce energy. And that's the source of all the energy coming from the Sun is this fusion process. Fusion, side note, occurs in the Sun when the protons of hydrogen atoms smash and they fuse together to make a helium and they also release a ton of energy in that fusion process and it takes four hydrogens colliding to make a helium. So helios, helium, heliosun. Do you get it? I didn't right before now.

Someone please tell me I'm not alone because this hurts. So you have these positive energy blobs and these negative energy particles and they are in this incredibly energetic soup where they're all flowing around. And when you have negative and positive energies that are separated from each other like that, you can produce magnetic fields. And that is the other major thing that drives the sun, are these currents of plasma causing magnetic fields. And that's really what makes the sun.

It's plasma, it's magnetic fields. And understanding how those two things interact with each other is complicated. And we understand it to a certain degree, but man, there's a ton of stuff we just don't understand about that, how the plasma magnetic fields interact, even though the ingredients are relatively simple. So according to a NASA piece titled Understanding the Magnetic Sun, the surface of our solar body, quote, rides and dances, and it has more rhythm and confidence than you, Ali.

Not the last part, that's just an assumption. Now, this is because when charged particles in the sun, they bang and they move around, they also create magnetic fields, which just causes them to move more, just like a mosh pit of elegant, stellar plasma. And when we hear always that we're made of exploded star

stuff, but it's mostly helium and hydrogen with some metals. Now do those particles change when they leave that sphere or do those become subatomic? I mean I realize that these are very perhaps not smart questions but I might not be the only one wondering, so you never know. Oh, no, these are great questions. So when Carl Sagan was just saying, we're all stardust, that's literally true. However, there was a little piece in there

that you refer to, which is exploded stardust. And that is actually how you get the metals and the heavier elements out of a star, is you have to go through a supernova. OK, heads up, a supernova is this giant explosion of a star huge huge huge that's a supernova and a nova is this transient brightening of a white dwarf star we'll get to what that is in a minute and it's burning off accumulated fuel so novas that comes from the word new because it's this pow sudden brightening.

However, I prefer this now antiquated Chinese term for NOVAs, which is guest stars. Like ooh, solar system guest star. I love this NOVA. Exciting. Or NOVA in general. It doesn't have to be super. It can just be a regular one. So in that process of a star going through its energetic life cycle and collapsing in

on itself and either blasting out violently or just burping off its outer atmosphere. That's how you get all of those heavier elements deeper into the solar system. It is that process, that process of the collapsing star, the process of the dying star that produces those heavier elements. You need those violent reactions to get iron, to get uranium, to get calcium, to get oxygen. I mean, that's how you have to go through that cycle. So the original stars are conceived to be almost purely hydrogen, and they had to go through a burn cycle to produce these heavier elements and get them out into the universe.

So the sun has to go through some really intense shit to make heavy stuff, just like any true artist. As far as how compact it is, we really don't know. We have different types of stars. We have white dwarfs, black holes are stars that have collapsed on themselves. So even black holes were stars, right? And they're mad shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, shrinks. And then it'll explode. Our star is a G star and it's right there in like midlife.

So you have the early ones and then you have midlife and then you have the red giants and then you have the white dwarves. And our son is just, you know, if it was based on like human expectancy, you know, like 35 or something. 36, 40 something, you know, right around that expectancy, you know, like 35 or something. Okay. 40 something, you know, right around that age, you know. What are those types of stars? Because I'm unfamiliar, but like

you mentioned all the way up to like a red dwarf. Can you go up the line? Because I just don't know any of that. So basically, it's the evolution of a star. right? Starts really hot, then the outer edges start to cool off, and then you start to go down into what we have, which is I think we're 15 million Kelvin? And then it just starts to cool over time, but the mass is starting to crash in on itself at the same time. And then we move on to the red giants. Have you ever read The Time Machine? No, I haven't. You never read the book, The Time Machine? The mass is starting to crash in on itself at the same time. And then we move on to the red giants. Have you ever read The Time Machine?

No, I haven't. You never read the book, The Time Machine? No. Is it good sci-fi? It is the best sci-fi. Yes, you have to read it. And it's not that long either. I think it's like at the most 70 pages.

I'll put it on my list. So yes, let's get that on my reading list. And if you're like, HG, so Herbert George Wells wrote more than 50 novels and is considered the father of sci-fi. Also, people called him Bertie, and he married his cousin. Then they divorced, and he married some other lady, and then he had like 1 million affairs on her.

Not that it's any of our business. But the time machine novella put time travel in everyone's hearts and minds. And also also Bertie coined the term time travel. So one day maybe we'll all be time tourists just walking around stinky old castles or poking at dinosaur poo and taking influencer photos in fits that are made from mammoth. We can only hope. Either way quick rundown of stars in case this makes you better at Jeopardy. I didn't know any of this, let's run it down. So our sun is a main sequence star, which means that it started as a clot of gases and dust and then it gathered more matter and

started spinning and spinning, getting hotter and hotter until fusion happened and hydrogens became heliums. Now main sequence stars make up nine tenths of the stars in the universe and our Sun Technically is a G type main sequence star and the G is its spectral rating So you can be an O a B an A an F G a K You can be an M star O's are the hottest and the brightest and M is on the cooler and dimmer end So we're like a G right right? We're in there. Now what is a red giant star? This is a main sequence star that has begun to collapse,

but the helium fuses into carbon, and then that extra energy causes them to puff up until they dissipate and they become a nebula, which is like a cloudy space ghost made of dust and gas. Our star will eventually become a red giant. But before that, a blown away red giant's core is hanging out, and that's called a white dwarf star. And that gets cooler and cooler and cooler and cooler.

Now a neutron star is super dense. It has an incredibly dense core. And that's what's left after a supernova, after a star's hydrogen core kind of runs out so it starts fusing heavier atoms like carbon and neon and silicon and iron. And neutron stars again very dense. Now if that neutron star spins really fast you got a pulsar. Apparently some of these spin faster than blender blades so you get your little fingies out of a neutron star for so many reasons. Now red dwarf stars, not red giant stars, red dwarfs,

those are smaller main sequence stars. And when they release energy, it cools down and then it settles back to the surface. So it can recycle and keep mixing like a cement truck, all the while remaining smaller and cooler and existing potentially up to 14 trillion years. Red dwarf stars are like these modest stars. They live within their atomic means.

They just kind of poke along doing life under the radar like a turtle, minding its business. Now brown dwarf stars, ha, those aren't even actually stars, but they're bigger than our solar system's planets. But at their core, they're not really massive enough to do all that fusion and they barely emit light, no offense, and that's fine. Now sometimes people refer to our Sun as a yellow dwarf, but you should ignore those people because they are wrong people. So let's get back to our Sun. Is it mad? Is it stable? How close is it to just exploding and then everyone's dead? We have a bit of time.

It's about, we're about middle age. So the sun's about four and a half billion years old. And the sun will live to be about nine-ish billion years. So we are about halfway through. As the sun ages, its diameter will change. It will puff up its outer atmosphere a bit. So fortunately, we'll be long gone by then. I mean, I certainly don't expect to be around in a billion years. Me neither. But the outer atmosphere

of the sun will eventually encompass the orbits of Mercury and Venus and Earth and probably out to Mars. As it gets older, as so many of us do, you get a little bit, you know, a little larger around the waist and the sun is no different. Yeah. And the sun will actually puff out and encompass those interplanets and those interplanets will fall into the sun itself as it's aging. That means we'll get sucked in. So if the notion of this is terrifying and exciting, please enjoy our recent episode with Dr. Robert Gamble on black hole theory cosmology,

which covers such things like we don't really fully know what's happening in the universe, or what will happen in the future, or what the point of life is, I guess, if you really zoom out. Are we divine consciousness embodied in wet little sacks of love or bugs that infested paradise? Don't ask me. Do you ever have existential crises? Or are you over it? No, I mean, not about that. But you know, no, I mean, I think the thing that I really love about astronomy and thinking about the sun and in so many different ways is it's all cyclical. It's all cycles and understanding that the cycles came before you to create

you and then eventually those cycles will end and the cycles will continue. And you won't be here, but the cycles will continue. It's a little bit calming in a way. It's not quite so terrifying as, you know, it's you're gonna be wiped out tomorrow by an asteroid. That might be more terrifying than the sun's eventual death. But first, let's get some further humanoid background. How did these two big, energetic, powerful brains study such a big, powerful ball of

energy? And what about your cycle to get to where you are? How did you end up a heliologist, aka heliophysicist, which we're blowing both terms up right now. But how did you end up studying this? By accident. Really? Okay. Yeah.

Being a heliophysicist does not seem like something you can stumble into, but do elaborate. Okay. Yeah. I went to a small liberal arts college, Whitman College, out of high school, and was very interested in astronomy. Loved the idea of the universe and dark matter and all of those fun, exciting topics. And I was moving into the dorms my freshman year, and I was assigned a roommate, and his dad was a heliophysicist at Stanford. And I remember meeting him and thinking, man, your job sounds terribly boring. And so that was my first interaction with Healy physics. I thought, boy, this job sounds really

boring. So went through my undergraduate degree and still loved astronomy and got a double degree in physics and astronomy. And then didn't really know what I was doing with my life. I moved back home with my parents and worked as a caterer. Me too. I worked as a I did landscaping. Yeah, just picking up odd jobs. And after about six months of that, I realized that a I wasn't entirely happy with this life living at home with my parents. It's not what I aspired to. And B, I felt like I was wasting this four year degree

I just got, like, what am I doing with my life? So that was a little existential crisis thinking, speaking of crisis season. But at the same time, I was blasting out my resume to anybody in my network that I could think of and I was getting nowhere. I even remember cold calling John Mather, who is the recent Nobel Prize winner at Goddard Space Flight Center. Just because I wanted to, it's like, I here's where I want to be. So maybe if I call him, he'll have some advice.

And he was really nice. I have to say that was I was amazing. Other scientists I cold called were not so nice, but he was he was fantastic. And again, didn't actually give me any specific directions. So I decided to take a road trip across the country. And I was like, what? I'm not really doing anything. I'll visit some friends. I'm just sort of frustrated. I was in Tennessee and I got a phone call and somebody from Goddard Space Flight Center had my resume. Would I be interested in an interview? Like, yes, like I can be there in six and a half hours. Like, yes, I don't care what it is. And so I came in and interviewed to work with Dean Pesnell, who's the project scientist for the Solar Dynamics Observatory mission. And he offered me a job doing some scientific programming, doing a

little bit of science, and I just leapt at the opportunity. And so, you know, not what, five years after meeting my roommate's dad, who I thought his job was terribly boring, here I am working at NASA Goddard as a contractor doing heliophysics. I have a feeling it is not boring, especially not now when we've got an eclipse coming up in a couple of weeks. This is probably the only time that everybody really is interested in heliophysicists, otherwise we sort of fly under the radar. So yeah. I think that everyone just doesn't understand that the sun is to be understood. It's also solar flares.

When there's a solar flare that's going to kick your network off, everyone's like cold calling heliophysicists being like, what do I do? What's going on? But that's amazing that you ended up there and also that you had the gumption to call around and say, hey, anyone got any advice? Like that you could just call Nobel Prize laureate and be like, hey, extension 425, what's up? So, I mean, I have to say that sometimes being naive actually is a good thing because looking

back at it now, I was like, wow, that was really ballsy of me. But I didn't really think anything of it. It was just like, well, I don't know what else to do. Here's a cool guy that I'd love to talk to. So sometimes just being naive and taking a risk, you know, it pays off. I asked India about her background and how she became this rising star in Heliology. Did you always know that you wanted to go into something astronomical because I know that you're you have a focus in math you have very good math brain so when did

you turn from math to the math of the cosmos? Well I always loved astronomy and physics and especially computer science as more of a hobby or something that I did on the side or something that I really loved. So I would get like astronomy magazines, you know, physics today, those types of things. And I really didn't think that there was a direct avenue into physics and astronomy academically. It wasn't until I got in touch with my alma mater at the time, GSU, their astroinformatics group was looking for a statistician to try to help them predict solar flares. And I was like, hey, I'm a statistician, maybe I can help. And

then they were like, yeah, you sure can come on in. And then I started working with them and helping them do research with NASA. And then my advisor, who wasn't my advisor at the time, he was like, you know that you can actually get a PhD in this and things are becoming more interdisciplinary because you know, you have this idea that things are math, physics, computers, you know, this hardcore. But since computers started seeping into things, things started to become more interdisciplinary. And he was like, Hey, you do know that with your math background, you can like seamlessly go into damn near any branch of science that you want with that math foundation. And we need you here.

So you should consider it. And I was like, well, damn, okay. Yeah, let me try. And then I was accepted to GSU to get a PhD in astronomy. I started in astronomy. Oh, okay. And I moved accepted to GSU to get a PhD in astronomy. I started in astronomy. Oh, OK. And I moved over to physics. And that story shocks people when

I tell them that transition from astronomy over to physics. So yes, even heliologists may not have a clear eight-minute path from where they started to where they landed, which means none of us have to fulfill that expectation. Get the haircut, shoot the shot, figure out what you like and you're good at. No one's watching but you, and you have this tiny, tiny slice of time in that body of yours under the sun to make it fun and weird. Make it weirder. So many existential crises are being fixed right now, but all

eyes are, well hopefully not directly on the sun, but are also on what you do. So the eclipse is coming up. Did you see the 2017 eclipse? I did. I saw it in central Oregon. I led an outreach group for NASA science in Madras, Oregon. So a small town in central Oregon got beautifully clear skies. Fortunately, I scheduled it so it wasn't actually working during the eclipse, which was the best decision ever and was able to just be in a field with family and friends and watch the eclipse. And it is absolutely stunning. There really are no words to fully describe it. Did you see the 2017 eclipse?

You know what? I didn't. And I had friends, a bunch of friends, scientist friends, whom's I love, all took a road trip. And at the last minute, I didn't go because I was working on this podcast called All the Genes. It was like two weeks before we launched. And I missed it. And so it's been my dream since 2017 to see it because my friends, even skeptic friends, were like, it was the most surreal feeling to watch. One of them, my friend, Dr. Kara Santa Maria, was covering it for Nat Geo, and she said that she was alive covering it

and started crying. Fade, fade, fade, we're here. Here come the Bailey beads. Oh, now we can look at it. Oh my god. There it is. Wow. You can see the stars. You can see the planets.

Oh my god. You guys, I'm actually crying. This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my entire life. What is that experience like? It is, I mean, it is all of that in that seeing a total solar eclipse is in terms of all factors, people rank it just below seeing their child being born. So it's that level of deeply amazing and you don't quite understand what's happening, but it is really significant. If you saw a total solar eclipse, you'd remember it. It's not something that you're not quite sure if you saw it or not. You probably saw a partial eclipse and the partial eclipse is

neat. An annular eclipse is pretty cool. A total solar eclipse is something you tell your grandchildren about. I mean, it is orders of magnitude scale different between the experiences personally? I would say it is the most Amazing awe-inspiring natural event you could witness So, you know if you go to see the Grand Canyon or the Redwood Forest or any of those other? Spectacular like makes you feel small amazing feelings. This one is two three times better than that I I mean I cannot overstate it. Okay. So more astounding than the Grand Canyon, and maybe your offspring being born, depending

on how honest you're being. I don't know. I don't have kids, but I do have a picture of myself standing giddy at Arizona's chasm in the earth. I went alone. I had a stranger take my picture. I loved it. So if you're getting jazzed about even watching a live stream, let's set you up with some lingo. Okay, so a partial eclipse. During this, the moon looks like it takes a bite out of the sun, but it doesn't cover it completely. And an annular eclipse is not an annual eclipse, which is what I thought it meant at first. Rather, an annular eclipse is ring-like. So annular shares an etymology with anus. And an annular eclipse is when the moon covers the sun, but the sun is larger

in the sky than the moon, so there's a large ring around it. Now a total eclipse is when the moon obscures the full sun, and we only see a little bit of the sun's corona, which is that roiling upper atmosphere of the sun. And it looks like a glow around this silhouetted moon. Now Bailey's beads, that sounds fun. They are. They're twinkly little spots around the corona. So as the moon almost reaches totality and through these little twinkles, they're caused by the rough terrain of the moon's surface, letting some extra chunks of sunlight

shine in through those mountains. Now, the diamond ring, that's a solitary Bailey's bead, and it shines like a diamond ring, of course, but it's more expensive to behold, depending on your hotel prices. But the diamond ring shows up right before totality. Now, the stages of a total or an annular eclipse are stage one, when the moon just first starts obscuring the Sun with just a tiny bite. Stage two is when

the moon is just about eclipsing the whole last Sun. Totality is when it's at maximum coverage and then the third stage is as it's leaving. The fourth is when there's just a tiny bit of moon over the Sun. Now the umbra that's the shadow you're under during that total eclipse. But as you go out from that center point, the umbra, and you just see an eclipse as partial because of your angle relative to it. That's called a penumbra, and it means almost shadow. Also, did you know that watching an eclipse can get you shadow-banned? Only in that there are these rippling light effects that might shimmer up surfaces and

on the ground between the first and second contact and after the third contact. Those are called shadow bands. Gotcha, they're just called shadow bands. Now in terms of the other shadow bands, I don't know why your algorithm hates you, that's a different episode.

Actually specifically, it's TikTokology with Hank Green, which we did and I'm gonna link in the show notes. Okay, so eclipse wise, those are things to look out for if you get yourself under the umbra of a total solar eclipse. Life altering. I hear mesmerizing, existence affirming, something you can experience for a few minutes that contextualizes the fragility of life in the expanse of the cosmos. And I'm so excited. I was just sitting here with so many questions, it really makes me wonder. Big questions like, how was traffic?

It wasn't awful. It was okay. I didn't have the worst time because I was anticipating terrible traffic, but it was pretty rough a lot of places. Because I missed it, I have had a dream to see it for the last seven years. And so just a few weeks ago, I decided to just bite the bullet and I'm going to Carreville, Texas, which is two hours outside Austin. Okay, what if I missed my flight?

Am I sad and screwed for 1,000 years? So in 2033, there is the next solar eclipse that will hit the US, but that's the North Slope of Alaska. So above the Arctic Circle. So it'd be a trip. Anywhere in the continental US is 2044, and that is going to hit just a small little bite of Montana and North Dakota. So again, pretty remote. You'd have to make a real dedicated trip to see it in the continental US. So yeah, it is going to be a while until we actually get a good chance in the continental US to see a total solar eclipse. Non-North Americans, I see you. We're going to have more on global eclipses in a little

bit. Hang tight. Also, I'm sorry for all the miles and the Fahrenheits, too. It's embarrassing. Now, in eclipse, we've got the moon comes in, blocks the sun. What do you study also? Are you looking at the coronal ejections during an eclipse? How do heliophysicists approach this? Eclipses, historically, have been life-aling in terms of being able to see one for scientists. And I mean that not just like it inspires a lot of awe, but it has historically been

the source of confirming Einstein's theory of relativity, discovering helium, I mean those level of discoveries. And now the science that we're doing is much more focused on that Sun-Earth relationship, is understanding the relationship between the Sun and how the Sun influences the Earth. So the science that NASA is doing for the total solar eclipse both focuses on the corona and looking at flows and how material moves out from the Sun, how the solar wind forms, all of those ideas of material moving off of the Sun.

So scientists will be looking at the Sun through instruments, and they'll also turn their literal focus to Earth and not the Sun at the same time. Why point their gaze away from the Sun? Isn't that like turning around backwards at a concert? What are these NASA scientists? Killjoys? Knuckleheads? No. Then the other side of things is how studying the ionosphere, the upper Earth's atmosphere that is What are these NASA scientists? Killjoys? Knuckleheads? No. Then the other side of things is I was studying the ionosphere, the upper Earth's atmosphere that is partially ionized by the sun. So the atoms in the upper Earth's atmosphere get some electrons stripped off by solar radiation

and form a partially ionized plasma that covers all the Earth. Did you know you're living underneath a cloud of plasma? I did not. Now you do.'re living underneath a cloud of plasma? I did not. Now you do. The first news no one told me. Oh, God, I wasn't CC'd on that. Yeah, it's not bad though. And remember, plasma is made of hydrogen and helium ions in a goop alongside electrons.

And as stated in the paper, the Earth's ionosphere, a wall-less plasma laboratory. The Earth's ionosphere is plasma-esque at altitudes above 80 kilometers. So above 80 kilometers, we have something plasma-like. And where are satellites in this mix? They're orbiting Earth at about 160 to 2,000 kilometers high. So at the shallow end of that ionosphere plasma-like stuff that surrounds Earth. Also, weirdly, as I was working on this episode last night, I looked up and from my porch at sunset, I saw this huge glowing silver streak.

And I realized I was watching a Falcon 9 rocket launch just cruising up like a badminton birdie, as casual as a lost balloon. And it was carrying 22 Starlink satellites. If you want to hear more on that, you can enjoy our space archaeology episode on the space junk and garbage that orbits us with Dr. Alice Gorman, which is linked in the show notes. But yes, how are these satellites affected by solar shenanigans? Dr. Gorman I mean, like, if you're a satellite, it can be concerning. But if you're not in orbit, then it's actually

been here our entire life and our entire existence. So the plasma can change depending on the amount of solar radiation hitting that diat ionosphere. So when the sun is covered for a brief second, all of those processes that strip off electrons stop. And so there's a recombination, the nature of the plasma change in the ionosphere. Okay, so plasma recombination,

it's a little bit like it sounds. The positive ions in plasma bump into an electron or a negative ion, and they're like, hey, oh my God, how are you? And then they head off in the sunset to go make a new neutral atom. And yeah, that reverse ionization in the Earth's ionosphere plasma can

happen when the sun is covered for a sec. And then the sun pops back out again. And you can watch how all the ions change and then get reionized again as the sun comes back into view. So that's a really interesting natural experiment because you can watch all of this happen in real time and then watch how it changes and how it affects the rest of the atmosphere,

how it moves out in waves across the atmosphere. And so there's a number of science experiments probing the ionosphere to try to understand what are the specific effects on the sun and how do small changes in the sun affect changes in our own atmosphere? And will heliophysicists, will they be hunkered down looking through instruments and running code or do they set things up to observe and then they all piece out and go

to the path of totality and then meet back up on, you know, Wednesday whenever to look at the data? Most people are the second type. A lot of our instrumentation are set to run automatically. We know where the sun is in the sky. It's big and it's bright. It's easy to find. So a lot of the efforts are getting all of the experiments set up now. And that being said, there are some real time adjustments that are being made. Michael says some heliophysicists are launching a suborbital rocket mission to probe the Earth's ionosphere and what

will be a partial eclipse from their vantage point, but back down on Earth, though. The majority of heliophysicists have their hotel booked three years ahead of time, know exactly where they're going to be. They have their eclipse glasses and are just going to enjoy it. What about you? I will be in Dallas, Texas. So part of my role at NASA is to lead the Heliophysics Education Activation Team or NASA HEAT. And our job is to get heliophysics out into informal and informal learning audiences. So that's classrooms, after school clubs, talks in society.

So we are doing a big push in Dallas and we'll be at the Dallas Arboretum watching the eclipse and doing activities with kids and families. And how many seconds or minutes of totality will there be there? And can you explain a little bit about why there's a path of totality

and when it becomes partial versus total. Is it dark? Yeah. So in Dallas, I think we're getting just about four minutes of totality. So the path of totality is it all comes down to the spherical geometry of the sun, earth, moon relationship. I mean, it is literally just how things are positioned in the sky. So the length of totality, how many minutes of totality you get are based on the distance from exactly where you are exactly where the moon is and exactly where the sun is down to, you know, down to the inches or

millimeter level. If you start walking perpendicular to the path, like as you're leaving the path, the amount of totality will start falling off quite quickly. And so by the time you reach the edge of the path of totality, the sun is no longer completely blocked by the moon from your perspective and you get zero minutes of totality. For this April 8th, 2024 North American one though. The path width is, I want to say, 100, 120 miles wide. So in 60 miles, you go from the exact right place

to see that alignment between the sun, moon, and Earth to give you four minutes where the moon is completely blocking the sun. And then 60 miles away, you are exactly in the wrong place or just missed that, and you only see a partial eclipse. It's a deep partial, like 99% coverage, but it's still just a partial eclipse. So it's amazing to think like these are human scale sizes, like you can drive 60 miles in an afternoon. It's easy to do.

And that is the major difference between a partial and total soil eclipse is that position. So all of those relative positions and relative sizes of things in the sky all line up perfectly to be in that path of totality for that few fleeting minutes. Oh, I'm so I'm so excited. I definitely feel like I have made the right decision to haul myself to Texas for this. Like, I've been regretting it for seven years, but I feel like I'm due for another life changing every seven years. That sounds about right. I can have a little life changing as a treat. Can I ask you some questions that listeners

have submitted? Absolutely. Okay. We got a lot of questions. We have two guests and a solar event on the horizon. So we're going to get to those questions, including the audio questions you can submit if you're in the Ologies pals, Friends or BFF tier. But before we do, let's donate to a few relevant charities. And one I hear that is doing amazing work is Astronomers Without Borders. And April is Global Astronomy Month. And Astronomers Without Borders does sidewalk astronomy, online observation events, astro arts and crafts, and sharing

of observational equipment via Celestron and more. So to learn more, you can go to astronomerswithoutborders.org. And we're also going to donate to a cause in India's name, which is the Grady Memorial Hospital Health Foundation, which is based in Atlanta and whose mission is to work tirelessly to ensure that every individual in the metro Atlanta community is guaranteed access to world-class, compassionate health care, regardless of their ability to pay.

And they are Grady Memorial Hospital Health Foundation. So those donations were made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay. Your questions. First one up is from Diananda from Daniel Martin. Good. Hey, Ali. Daniel here from Australia.

I had a question about solar eclipses. Or is it eclipses? What is the plural of eclipse? Hmm. I've heard both. I say eclipses, but I've heard eclipses as well. So I prefer to say eclipses, but that might be in an American English thing.

So I don't know. But main question, Daniel says, is total solar eclipses, but that might be an American English thing. So I don't know. But main question Daniel says is, total solar eclipses seem to have been quite uncommon here in Australia, at least from my experience. Is that actually the case? Are there places in the world where total solar eclipses are more likely to occur? And if so, why? Oh, yeah, this is actually a really fun question. So don't worry. Australia is going to get plenty of eclipses coming up here in the next decade. So yes, you've had not many, but I think in the 2030s, or maybe it's like 2029 through 2039, Australia is going to see something like three or four eclipses coming across

the continent. So Australia is a great place to be coming up. LESLIE KENDRICK Australia, I've never seen you in person, but one day I want to meet your wombats, I want to meet your kangaroos, I want to see your oligites. But you last saw an eclipse, hopefully safely, with glasses on the day of our Lord 420 in 2023, like a year ago. But if you missed it, you can mark your calendar for July 22nd, 2028. Put a note in your phone as Sydney is right in the path of totality.

And you've also got a few in the next decade. November 25th, 2030, July 13, 2037, December 26, 2038. Put them in your phone. But if you miss the 2038 one, you better be in good health because you're going to be waiting another 30 years for one in Australia. And as someone prone to putting things off, don't pull on me. Get your tickets, book your flights. Book your flights now, hotels, rental cars. Yeah, just get it all done right now. I cannot find a rental car in Austin, by the way. We were looking on Craigslist to maybe

buy like a $2,000, a 20-year-old car to use for the week and then just sell it before we go. We're like, is that legal? I don't know. Yeah, rental cars scarce in Austin. And now what about other continents? Do heliophysicists today go around like solar storm chasing or eclipse chasing like tornado experts? Yes. In a word, yes. I have a couple of good friends that will spend tens of thousands of dollars to see solar eclipses. This is their own personal money, own personal vacation time. I mean, they're not funded to do a research project or anything like that. It's just because they love them so much. So going to see a total solar eclipse is definitely about the journey as it is about seeing the eclipse itself. There's a word for this and it's umbra file, meaning someone who's drawn to the shadow.

So if you like eclipses, feel free to update that hinge profile nerds find each other. So the next total solar eclipse after this one is in Iceland and Spain, which I think sounds like a pretty cool journey. So I hope to be in Spain in 2026. But more generally, eclipses happen in the Northern Hemisphere a little more frequently than in the Southern Hemisphere. And this statistically bears out over 5,000 years. If you look at 5,000 years of eclipses

and put all the paths on a map and stack them on top of each other, NASA actually has a great visualization of this if you need a picture. I moseyed on over to the NASA site, 5,000 years of total solar eclipses, which featured a printable map, should you need it, with more eclipses represented in lighter, warmer colors like a heat map.

And the Northern Hemisphere, you are certainly favored to see them. And the NASA site says kind of jauntily, a total solar eclipse can happen absolutely anywhere on Earth. In fact, there isn't a single pixel on the map that isn't visited by at least one eclipse. They say not a single goose egg in any of the 14.6 million points sampled by the map. That's good odds over a long period of time. The reason for this is the seasons. In the northern hemisphere, the sun appears slightly smaller in the sky during the summertime than the southern hemisphere's summertime. So when you have the sun appearing slightly smaller

in the sky, because we're a little bit further away, it's easier for the moon to line up to block the entire disk of the sun. That being said, on average, I think it's 320 to 360 years between any one location having eclipses. So if you're standing on the ground, on average, you can wait 360 years between seeing an eclipse. I think in the Northern

Hemisphere, it's like 320 years. In the Southern Hemisphere, it's like 410 years or something like that. So, yeah, it is more than a human lifetime. Yeah. You got to really take your vitamins, hydrate, if you want to catch that, if you want to not travel. It's been 84 years. So this next one was on the minds of patrons, Olivia Lester, Carol Young, Rachel Ucomurra, Amanda Lask, Bonnie M. Rutherford,

Sam Gilbert, Megan Walker, Sean Thomas Kane, Tyra Pereira, and first time question askers, Dylan S. and Claire Ritchie, as well as Jen Baker, who asked, why, how do sun farts, flares affect us? And... Hi, this is Deborah from Placentia. Can you explain the relationship between solar flares and sunspots?

Thanks. That's actually a good question. A sunspot is... You can physically see a sunspot. It's like a black hole on the Sun. It's like an actual black hole. A solar flare you can see in videos is the actual goddamn flare. That's pretty cool. Like a flame kind of coming off? No, that's the CME. Well, I'm not gonna say first in sequence. We don't know if it's in sequence. We know that the probability of a sun spot,

then a flare, then a CME being in sequence is pretty high. Okay. I'll say that. But sun spot shows through the corona, it's a cooler spot there. Flare is the same spot, but it's flashing now. And then the CME, huge bubble coming out of it. And that's a coronal mass ejection. Yes.

Okay. And what is, does the bubble like pop and burp? What's in that burp? Well, it's like a jump rope. So it's not an actual bubble. It's like a jump rope. It's like a cord. And then that cord will snap sometimes. I mean, well, every time it will snap, it doesn't just stay there forever. Does it floop around like one of those, one of those gas station dancing socks? Not from what I've seen. Not saying that it won't ever happen, but not from what I've seen. From what I've seen, it's just like a loop.

And then the plasma starts to fall down from the loop and it's pretty cool to see. But we do believe that they are connected, but we don't have concrete proof that it's in sequence. Spot, flare, CME. Will these mess up your life or do you have to do that yourself? Jen Squirrel-Alvarez had a question about the sun. Hi, this is Jen Squirrel-Alvarez. I have a question about the sun.

What's the deal with solar flares and why do they fuck up GPS and all that stuff? And can I just blame all of my problems on solar flares? I feel like I should be able to. All right, yeah. So a solar flare is an eruption on the sun where you get twisted magnetic fields on the sun to the point where they actually break and reconnect with each other.

So this is called magnetic reconnection. It's incredibly energetic. Visually, you can think of it as like, if you take a rubber band and you twist it too much, I don't know, like I had one of those little airplanes growing up where it was a rubber band driven one, you wind the propeller. And if you got a little too enthusiastic,

like I did many times, you wind it too many times, the rubber band would snap and then it would hurt your fingers and yeah, your little plane would be ruined. That is kind of equivalent to what happens on the sun. So you get magnetic fields twisting and swirling around each other.

And you get enough shear enough twisting in those magnetic fields where they actually will reconnect the break and release a bunch of energy. And this the amount of energy that something like a medium sized solar flare releases more energy in a few seconds than all of humanity has ever used. No. Yeah. So everything from from fires, caveman fires all the way up to nuclear reactors, everything that releases more energy in that a few seconds than humanity's ever used. Wow.

Very energetic. I checked into this and yeah, via NASA, the energy burped off from a solar flare can be 10 million times greater than the energy released from a volcanic explosion. Is that not scary enough? Okay, NASA also whispered to me on one of its websites that the most powerful solar flares have the energy equivalent of a billion hydrogen bombs, enough energy to power the whole world for 20,000 years. Solar panels, bring them on. To the sun though, a solar flare barely notices. It's just a little blip. It's like

telling someone who's the most gorgeous person you've ever seen that you like their kneecaps. They're like, okay, thanks. Solar flares, not that big a deal to the sun. But it's a good thing that we have pocket computers and heliophysicists that have Excel sheets to keep an eye on this. Because back in 1859, there were two amateur astronomers

who happened to notice what is thought to have been a massive coronal mass ejection, a CME, on the surface of the sun. And one of them was Richard Carrington, for whom the great solar storm known as the Carrington event of 1859 was named. The other guy was Richard Hodgson. He got a raw deal. Nothing named after him that I know of. That's just my opinion.

So, okay, what was this? What happened? A few patrons had questions Including about the scale of it through our modern eyes Bonnie M. Rutherford, Kelly Schaefer, Carrington event Enthusiast Tim and Cassidy McKee. So India told me a little bit more about this legendary space weather Have you heard of the Carrington event? Okay, you should look that up too. This happened in the 1800s. And it caused a child with a head back then, the little Morse code thing. Oh, um, yeah, I forgot the name of it. Palligrams?

Yeah, yeah. We'll go with that. It caused issues with that. So yes, this thing hit the Earth's magnetosphere hard, possibly because one right before it cleared the way via its own solar wind. But as a result, the telegraph operational systems were jacked. Sparks flew from some of the towers. Some telegraph lines ran despite not being plugged into power at all. Now the night sky, all the way from the poles to the equator, was streaked with auroras, these gauzy pink to sometimes blood

red tendrils, described by one witness as, quote, crimson, fleecy vapors. And these appeared at much lower latitudes than one would ever expect from a geomagnetic aura. Kind of a late summer light show that stopped us earthlings in our tracks in 1859 to stare up at the sky. And yeah, it also stopped some telegraph operators in their tracks because they were zapped

into unconsciousness. Now I was reading through this paper, the Carrington solar flares of 1859, consequences on life. And I didn't see any mention of deaths attributed to the Carrington Solar Flares of 1859, Consequences on Life. And I didn't see any mention of deaths attributed to the Carrington event. But of course, they couldn't have pulled everyone. Now, it did note, however, that the US press of the time indicated some anecdotal incidences of abnormal behavior,

like an increase in public drunkenness in New Orleans. Let them party. It's an event. Now, it also continues that the only statistical anomaly, which could be found, is an increase in birth rates in Paris nine months after the Carrington event. Hey, is your romantic connection electric, or is it just the actual atmosphere?

La vie en rose-colored sky, perhaps. So now when we refer to a Carrington class event, it's like, whoo, that's a big boy. Now, as for Richard Carrington himself, life did not pan out in his favor. I checked out this book, The Sun Kings, The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began by Stuart Stuart Clark. And it details that beneath the veneer of Carrington's scientific success was the consuming rot of family duty. He inherited his family's brewery, which consumed most of his time just logging through it and getting to his astronomy passion, which he was really good at, just became harder

and harder and harder. And he applied and was passed up for a job at Cambridge because of some office politics. And then his wife was found dead in her bed of a sedative overdose. And he was kind of low key blamed for it. Like maybe he killed her, but people said he didn't. And then he died alone in his mom's house,

locked in a room shortly thereafter of a sudden brain hemorrhage, though the room was littered with empty bottles of the same sedative that killed his wife, Rosa. So he, in his will, gave two scientific societies $2,000 each, that's a ton of money, even though one didn't even acknowledge him after his death. Can you believe that?

Rude. He also asked to be buried atop his favorite observatory spot on a hill, but his mother was like, nah, and just chose to bury him elsewhere. But above his grave is an inscription in Latin that says, thus do we reach the stars. So in death he is remembered, and his life and the Carrington event is said to have birthed this whole new interest in space weather. Also really thinking about Richard Hodgson, the other amateur astronomer, I think he got off just fine. Now what if you want to see an aurora without it being a gigantic unpredictable Sun storm? So you patrons had aurora spotting questions such as Shannon O'Grady, Eileen Lanz, Matt Thompson, Cool Nick Star, and first-time question asker Ashlyn Noble and Michelle Cabrera who wrote in, a few years back my husband and I drove

to the northern ass end of Finland to see the Aurora for my birthday. Only just as we were getting packed and ready to go, Hubby happened to check out solar activity for that year and month and found out that we were at the bottom-ass end of the 11-year cycle of solar activity. Boo! But we did manage to see some northern lights and we thought they were amazing. But we were still a little bummed at the idea of minimal northern lights. So a little advice. Some say that the best place to post up is in the upper northern hemisphere at the time

of the spring and the autumn equinoxes, with October giving a better shot at clearer skies. Now we're at a solar maximum, all right? Solar cycle 25, it peaks in July of 2025. So you have an even better chance at catching a glimpse of auroras, which are solar flares and CMEs, those coronal mass ejections. Michael explains. So what happens is there's a ton of radiation that gets blasted off of there. And I mean like x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, if it's really big, you'll get to see some visible

light coming out of it. And it's just all this high energy radiation rushing towards the Earth. And what can happen is it can A, change the ionosphere so it can disrupt signals passing through the ionosphere. So GPS satellite, it's in orbit, its signal passes through the ionosphere and comes to your phone. When that ionosphere is disrupted, those signals can get moved around and ionosphere is disrupted, those signals can get moved around and you can get, you know, your uncertainty on your GPS goes from a few feet to, you know, a half mile or something like that. So you can get lost. It can say you're someplace else. You lied to me. Yeah. The other thing is with coronal mass ejections, they're sometimes related, sometimes not. So that's when a whole lot of plasma comes off the sun. This is a big burst of electrons, protons, and neutrons all in this magnetic cloud.

It comes racing off the sun, and that can actually impact satellites itself. So the electronics on satellites, you have a bunch of free electricity just floating around in magnetic fields. It's not so great for sensitive electronics. Every time there's a big solar storm, there's usually a satellite that is tough coming back online again. So that's really the other effect. I don't know if you could blame all of your problems on solar flares, but I mean, it's

not a bad excuse. If you got lost on the way to the grocery store or to your office or something like that, yeah, you could probably blame solar flare. I'm just going to blame solar flares for everything, if that's okay. Thanks so much. Many of you had solar storm anxiety and I'm looking at you, Chris Lewis Ashton, Edward Rice, Anna Thompson, Kendall M, Andy Townsend, Earl of Graham Ilkin, Aurora Cullen, first time questioner, Patrice Pachicha, Domino Cohn and Claire Ritchie who asked, how scared

should we be of solar flares? Eek. I asked India, she did not mince words. Okay. And now what can we do to prepare if we know a solar storm is coming? I mean, other than sunscreen. Yeah.

Anything we could do? Do you put a tinfoil hat? Does a tinfoil hat help? Well, we know it's coming. We can build things so that it's harder to penetrate through. Just like if a tornado is coming, what can we do to prepare? Get your ass in the basement and let it do its thing. It's just like any other type of weather.

We can't stop it. We can't prevent it. We could just brace your fucking self. Yeah. And I hate to sound so, you know. But it's a sun. It's huge. It's huge, yellow, and bright.

Wait. Is it yellow? What am I talking about? I don't know. Patrons, Christine Pickstein, ESOparty, Alyssa Gregory, Matt Herschel, Marianne Breckenridge, Appelina Pina, Megan Kelly, Charlie McKenzie, and First Time Question Askers, Katie Munoz,

Carrie Linkhort on behalf of Maeve, who is 10. Sorry about my swears. We do have Classroom Safe episodes called Smologies, which are G-rated. But everyone wanted to know about colors. Allison Hatt, Owl, and Sairam Mans wanted to know why the sun wears sunglasses, because in Sairam's words, whose light is she shielding?

We'll never know about the fashion secrets, but let's ask Michael about colors on behalf of those other patrons. So the sun produces all wavelengths of light. So every single wavelength of light there is from gamma rays all the way down to radio waves. The sun produces them all. The spectrum of light that it produces, so it produces all those different colors. If you look at the visible spectrum, the visible spectrum of light from the sun peaks in sort of the pale yellow to yellow green color. So like right there, that's the peak of the spectrum. So that is the color of light coming off the sun in sort of a generic case. But if you

go into space and take a picture like astronauts did when they were on the moon, the sun looks white. I mean, it is a white color, not yellow. So the reason we see yellow is because of our atmosphere. Our atmosphere scatters blue light particularly well. That's the reason why the sky looks blue is because it scatters blue light and kind of scatters around and glows. And so when you take the sun's sort of white light and scatter away some of the blue, the shorter wavelengths, then it moves it from sort of a white color into a little bit more yellow-orange color. So that's why we see this sun as sun-colored. Why is the sun going night-night on the horizon so pretty? According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, weather scientist and sunset enthusiast, Stephen F. Corfidi, in a 2022 article titled simply, The Science of Sunsets. So when the sun is low, like a daybreak or dusk in the sky, the path of sunlight through

the atmosphere is longer, giving more distance for the blue light end of the spectrum to scatter elsewhere. And he writes that a beam of sunlight that at a given moment helps produce this red sunset over the Appalachians is at the same time contributing to a deep blue late afternoon sky over the Rockies. But LA sunsets are gorgeous because our air is full of soot and cancer, right? Not so. Big old flim flam. Sunsets are actually generally muted

by these large aerosol particles like pollution. And the typical really beautiful sunsets usually involve clean air with low humidity, not a lot of moisture in the air, and the right kind of high clouds to catch the glow of the sunset and then reflect it downward. So patrons love to say hello, Neen and Charlie McKenzie. I hope that gives your sunsets even more context

for you to stare at. Do you think that's why we think it's on fire? Because we think, oh, flames are kind of yellow. Yeah, exactly. But the sun is a whole lot hotter than flames. And so that's where it's a little bit misleading. But in just simple terms, you look at a flame in a fire and you look at the sun, you're like, yeah, it's about the same color. So, yeah. Okay. So that's the story on the hue. What about heat? Maria K, Rachel Fuller, Megan Morgan, Eric Larson, Michelle Parkin Kelly, and Scarlett P. Just so you have this blazing number burning a hole in your pocket. The sun's core is about 15 million degrees Celsius,

or about 27 million in Fahrenheit. That's the core. The middle-ish layer, the photosphere, is only about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 5,500 degrees Celsius. And then as you go up through the chromosphere, it raises 500 degrees Celsius. But then, for thousands of miles above the surface of the Sun,

that golden crown, the Sun's corona, starts getting hotter again, up to 1 million degrees Celsius or 1.8 Fahrenheit. So really hot, less hot, really hot again. So there's some serious incineration. Can we harness all that energy to our advantage other than just growing and sustaining every living thing on Earth, which is what the sun is already doing. Lexi Cable, Lynette Villa, Simone Francour, and Figman wanted to know.

This next question is kind of a garbage question. Sweet Chili first-time question asker wants to know, what if we built an enormous catapult on Earth and took all of our garbage and launched it into the sun once a month. Could this save us from ourselves? Well, a catapult would be hard. You might be able to do like a trebuchet. I don't know. So I understand the vibe of like, oh, we have a bunch of trash that we've created. Let's just get rid of it. But I think that it would cause more harm than good because that trash has a ton of really useful resources in it. I mean, I know it doesn't seem that way, but those heavy metals that are left over in your batteries and all those things are actually useful in terms of sustaining life on Earth.

And so in a short term, yeah, it could be helpful. It would not be a recipe for keeping humans going on Earth because eventually we'd, you know, get rid of all of the heavy metals on this planet. And we need some of them for technologies. Yeah. God, that's a good answer. Okay, that's good to know. We'll keep the garbage for now. Well, I mean, we still have to do something with it. For more on how much garbage our little species makes and where it goes and what we should do with it and how much of your recycling is actually recycled, please get your heart broken and see our discard anthropology episode with sanitation expert and NYU professor, Dr. Robin Nagel. It is the opposite of garbage. It's a wonderful

episode. It's also fascinating. Now let's talk about making atomic and subatomic friends. So Lisa Mihuis, Ricky Gervitz, Mike Campbell, Maureen Flood, Carlos Baracol, Tiger Uri. First-time question askers Tobiah G., Daniel Beck, and Donicello. In Donicello's words asked, if a person were to be thrown in the sun, would their atoms become part of the sun's nuclear fusion reaction,

thereby contributing to the light which feeds our planet? But on a less visual note, first-time question asker. Victoria Maslach wanted to know, where does the sun get its energy from? Yeah. And what's in the center? Is it like a gobstopper? Fantastic invention.

Revolutionize the industry. You can suck them and suck them and suck them and they'll never get any smaller. Never. At least I don't think they do. Few more tests. I don't think it's like a gobstopper because it's really, really hot.

You know, talking about millions of degrees. And I don't think gobstopper because it's really, really hot, you know, talking about millions of degrees. And I don't think gobstoppers are quite that hot. But the core of the sun is where you get fusion. You take hydrogen through a few different steps, you can fuse into helium. And that process of taking hydrogens and forcing them together. And that's why you need to have extreme heat for fusion is that how do you force these hydrogens together? Well, you get them going really fast when it's really hot and then they eventually will slam into each other and you can get fusion. That process of fusion, it releases a tremendous amount of energy and it's so much energy that it would actually blow itself apart if you just had the core of the sun. So if you just had

the solar core by itself, there's enough energy being produced that it would blow itself apart if you just had the core of the Sun. So if you just had the solar core by itself, there's enough energy being produced that it would blow itself apart. However, there's a whole lot more Sun there than just the core. There's many other layers stacked on top and the gravity of all of those other layers, all that other hydrogen, helium pushing down on the core, keeps it in balance between the energy being produced and pushing out from the interior of the Sun and the gravity pushing it into the sun to create this nice little stationary ball. And so that's why the sun is the size it is because it's a balance between the gravity pulling all the material in and the energy being produced at the core pushing everything out.

I asked India about this as well. I like to think of it like it's solid in the middle and I have a feeling it is not. Well, all of the chemicals that we know comes from stars. You know that, right? Like when stars explode, all of the hydrogen, helium, iron, all of that comes from an exploding star because what happens is nuclear fusion takes place. Our sun is mostly hydrogen and helium and the speeds are so fast, they crash into each other

and it causes those heavier elements. So there is a core of the sun. Do we know if you can stand on that shit? Probably not. I don't know if it's actually solid, but what I do know is that there are heavier elements inside that we can actually physically touch on Earth. All right, we need a whole episode on nuclear power,

but quick aside, a few months ago, China announced some major success with a nuclear fusion reactor that acts as an artificial sun, and it smashes atoms together to form heavier ones, which releases heat, like the sun, that can be used as a power source. And currently, nuclear power plants use fission. They're splitting atoms, but leaving

this risk for radioactive waste that can harm us and the planet. Now, by contrast, fusion-based power appears to be much safer, cleaner, and using hydrogen from seawater as fuel could power humanity for millions of years if we all don't die first, not to be sad about it. Anyway, exciting stuff. Also, in a few days, I'm going to be in Texas, where a lot of things are gargantuan, except for the sun in the sky this time of year, thankfully. But when it comes to size, what about our beloved sun? Not that it matters, but patrons Matt Cicato, Carol Young, Gigi Nose, Wendy Miller, Scarlett P., Emma B.,

Ewan Monroe, Megan Morgan, Dave Cannon, and first-time question asker Wendy Parson wanted to know how ours stacks up. And how big is our sun compared to other suns? Do we have a tiny sun? Do we have a big sun? It's pretty small. Oh! Yeah, we have, it's called a dwarf star. And the reason it's a dwarf is just the wear it is on the evolutionary spectrum, evolutionary line as stars go. But it's not that big, really.

Stars get a whole lot bigger than the sun. That's a good thing that it's not that big either because if we were around a more energetic star it'd be a whole lot harder to sustain life because the Sun is is nicely a little bit active but not crazy. It's not gonna you know irradiate the entire Earth every couple years and kill all living things which would be terrible so yeah. As it stands our Sun is about 33,000 times the mass of Earth, and it makes up 99.86 of the mass of our solar system. Well, what if it were even bigger? What if we did supersize it? Patrons, okayest mom's husband, Emily Stauffer, Pafka34, Melissa, cool last name

Ward, ggnoes, and first time question asker Colleen Chick all wanted to know about the Goldilocks zone, a very lovely habitable range we happen to live in. If we had a bigger sun, would we need to be further out to be in a Goldilocks zone? Absolutely. Yeah, to be in that ideal zone, but it's the unstableness of those magnetic fields so that if you have a bigger star, you're going to have more energy produced in the star, which means that all of the events, all of those things that happen on our sun can be more energetic.

Also, if you get small enough, you get these crazy convection currents where the material is pulled out from deeper into the star and pulled out to the surface, which means you can get really crazy magnetic fields. And they observe these in satellites of these crazy huge flares coming off of a star and I mean crazy huge, I mean like as much energy coming off of a flare as a star is producing at that time. So like the star would get twice as bright in the sky kind

of a thing and like, yeah, that's not really sustainable however far you are from it. Rachel Cash wants to know when the sun and the moon cross paths, it's a kiss, isn't it? I bet it is, they say. I mean, it could be a kiss. It could be a dance, too. I think it's more of a dance, more like a passing touch. They don't really kiss as much as they just walk by each other slowly, sort of maybe give each other the eye and then going, I don't know if that's flirty or because they don't like each other. I'm not sure about that.

But yeah, it's less kissing and more just like, you know, passing each other like chips passing in the night, maybe. We can't ship them quite yet. The last questions I always ask are usually what's your favorite and your least favorite thing about what you do. But because there's so much opportunity here, I'm going to ask you, some people want to know, Ken, Nat, for some question asker, and Megan, Morgan wanted to know, what are the current mysteries about the Sun that heliologists and heliophysicists

don't understand? Like is there a mystery that vexes you that we don't, we just don't know yet? Yeah, well there are several. The one that is most frequently answered or held up, and I'll say what my favorite one is. Most frequently one is talking about the solar corona, what you'll be able to see during a total solar eclipse. So the solar corona is millions of degrees. The surface of the sun is a few thousand degrees, five, six thousand degrees. Why? That's weird. It's like you're sitting at a campfire and you're walking backwards and the air is getting hotter. Like, that's not how it's normally supposed to work. So there's plenty of energy coming out from the sun to heat the corona. That's not the problem.

The issue is how do you get the energy from the surface of the sun into the corona in such a way that you heat it up to millions of degrees? So yes, the outskirts of the sun hotter than the surface bonkers. Michael loves this fact, as do I. And I found this recent 2023 study titled Polarization of Decayless Kink Oscillations of Solar Corona Loops published in the journal Nature. And it opens with this declaration that, quote, decayless kink oscillations of plasma loops in the solar corona may contain an answer to the enigmatic problem of solar and stellar coronal heating. So a space.com article was titled, scientists may finally know why the sun's outer atmosphere

is so freakishly hot and it tried to explain it to non-heliologists like us saying that the waves are relatively weak but they don't decay in strength over multiple cycles and they may potentially supply a large amount of energy into the corona over time. So by not decaying the heat and the energy could be building up instead of cooling down as expected. Folks are working on it, but now every time the Sun hits your face on a warm summer afternoon, just think about those hot, hot polarization of decayless kink oscillations. Heliologists are. That's an outstanding problem. We have ideas. There are no conclusive answers yet. So it's a weird one. My favorite is solar cycles. So the sun goes through 11-year cycles from quiet, where

there aren't very many flares or sunspots, to very active, where there are lots of flares and sunspots, which is kind of where we are now. About every 11, 12 years. We don't know why exactly. I mean, we have some thoughts, but we really don't know why why is it 11 years? Why does it go through a cycle? What what's causing that to begin with is it that way forever or just right now? I mean all those questions are still Really outstanding on what is actually going on with the solar cycle, but it's been observed by astronomers for oh 350 years now So it's not like it's going away by astronomers for, oh, 350 years now. Wow.

So it's not like it's going away. 11 years. I wonder what's going on with that. I'm sure astrologers have a lot of thoughts about it. India mentioned solar cycles ups and downs to me. The sun has moods. India, explain. We do have solar minimum and solar maximum.

So we're actually going into a maximum right now, I believe. What does that mean? Where we have the most solar events. So it's no compared to the minimum. We don't need that. It happens every 11 years. Roughly every 11 years is the solar cycle. So yeah, we- It's an election year. It's like four years of a pandemic. Like isn't that enough?

We need an 11 year solar cycle. Yeah. And you know, it is a bipartisan effort. So I will say that space weather is a bipartisan effort, but we are going into a maximum right now, and we use time series analysis for, you know, that's how, well, the solar cycles were figured out before we even involved computers. So let's turn the spotlight to what brightens the days of these two heliologists. What's your favorite thing about your job or about being a scientist or being a heliologist? Is there anything that you just like love that gets you excited?

I genuinely love all of it. I love everything about being a scientist. I love being able to discover things like survival analysis is a statistical method that has its origin in medicine. And it's been used in finance and even been used in gambling and betting. It's basically predicting time to an event. So it started as time to death. So you would have a collection of cancer patients and then you analyze their time to death. And this technique has never been used in space weather to detect the time to detection of solar energy particles. So what I found is that survival analysis gives us the same outcome as any other method that we've used, which means that it could be viable. That's what's exciting about science.

It's like, okay, it's not technically something new that I discovered, but this new technique can be used in this field. And that is what's so much fun about being a scientist and then collaborating with other scientists. And then of course, let's talk about the obvious, working with people at NASA, you know, actually going onto a NASA base,

actually getting a NASA ID, and then being able to be a part of programs that people dream about, you know? You follow your dream. As for Michael's favorite factoid, patrons Daniel White, James Nance, Tiger Yiddy, and Doug Stewart all asked, what is your favorite fact about the sun? What is something that you just wish everyone knew. So I think my favorite like little gee whiz about the Sun is the the energy produced at the core. We talked about that earlier. Okay

so energy is produced, infusion, and then it starts moving outward from the core of the Sun. It takes maybe 10,000 years ish to get from the core of the sun to the surface of the sun. And then it takes eight minutes from the surface of the sun to our eyes. So that little photon is born in infusion, and then it keeps on getting scattered and reabsorbed and moved to other places because the sun is dense and it's hot and it's a very chaotic environment where there's lots of mixing and there's lots of activity going on. So it takes this random walk, this bouncing around for years and years and years all the way until it gets to the surface of the sun. And then once it reached that photosphere layer, the

layer that we see when you're using your safety eclipse glasses, I'll get that in there, your solar safety solar viewing glasses, that layer that you see, the photon goes pretty much on a direct path from there to your eye. And so when you see the sun, that photon was formed thousands of years ago, and then in a matter of minutes lands in your eye, and then you interpret it as the sun. And that little, like that little factoid is just, it's amazing, because the sun is just bright in the sky. And thinking about how all that light got to where you are just always amazes me. And that's a fun one. I love that it has been waiting in the wings sort of like, and that it's just like, there's

it. And any last advice to people who are planning to see the eclipse? I definitely got my eclipse glasses early, which is shocking that I did anything early, but I made sure to get them from a vetted source. I know that there's some fakes out there that can sizzle your retinas, apparently. Also, Lester, do you think that these warnings are like the don't cross your eyes for a sec because they're going to stick like that or a watermelon seed can grow vines in your colon. This one has merit, and it also has a name, solar retinopathy or eclipse retinopathy. And it is a light-induced injury to your central retina or macular tissue, which can lead to

permanent loss of your central vision. And for more on parts of the eye, you can see the ophthalmology episode with friend and eye expert Dr. Reed Weiness. It's a good one. Now, you need solar viewing glasses at a rating. It's called ISO12312-2 to be exact, to be safe. And yeah, there are fakes out there. Horrible.

So check places like the American Astronomical Society for trustable brands and links if you have time. Hang on if you've got good ones in case another eclipse rolls by your sky in a few years, or if a friend needs them on their travels. Because you want an eclipse to be life-changing in a good way, not in a way that results in a lot of ophthalmology appointments, even if your doctor is cool, like Reed. Any other advice?

If you do have the chance to use some eclipse glasses, you shouldn't be able to see anything through them except extremely bright lights. Like if you have a halogen bulb or the flash on a camera, you can see that in the eclipse glasses but nothing else. Like there should be, you should not be able to see any other lights. So during a partial eclipse, or even during the stages of two or three, you can hold up a colander and you can see the dozens of little crescent-shaped shadows that the sun casts. And during this recent partial eclipse in LA last October, Jarrett and I were walking

Grammy and all the dappling of sun through the tree leaves looked hook shaped. So cool. Um, you can also look for crafts using like pinhole cameras. Even a disco ball will throw scattered light in the shape of the eclipse sun. Also sunscreen and water. Can you do that? If you get a heat stroke, there's too much traffic for an ambulance.

Now, what about psychological preparations? And then sort of on a personal note, I would say because there's a high chance of clouds, it's springtime in the northern hemisphere, and there's a chance that it's going to be cloudy. Make the eclipse a more of an event. Get to wherever you're going early. Bring a picnic. I don't know, bring family or friends, go to a party and do some fun activities. If it's clouded out but it's still going to get dark outside, you can still observe the world around you and how that changes as the sun is obscured by the moon and it gets dark around you. So I hope that everybody sees a beautifully clear day that day, but you know, just to make sure that you don't pin all of your hopes and wishes and dreams on those few fleeting moments of cloudless skies.

That's very, very good advice. Smart. There's always Spain in 2026, and I hear that's really nice. There must be little pods of people that travel together like, see in a couple of years, which is darling. That's great. Oh, yeah, absolutely It's sort of like I know that the Grateful Dead there's just following Umbra files assemble Aspiring Umbra files start looking for hotels for like 2038 figure out a rental car now. Let me tell you I'm sure you you're ticking down to the days when you travel, so you're going to start packing up your glasses.

Oh yeah, I have my binoculars, the solar viewing binoculars, I have my glasses, I have all my NASA stickers to give away on the flight. I'm really getting excited for this. Also NASA will be doing a live broadcast. Check out nasa.gov or go to NASA's YouTube page and you can see a live broadcast of the eclipse. We'll have telescopes across the path, so if it's cloudy where YouTube page and you can see a live broadcast of the eclipse. We'll have telescopes across the path. So if it's cloudy where you are, you can still virtually visit Mazatlan, Mexico or Torreón, Mexico, where it's likely to be clear. I will pop on and

say hi in Dallas during the recording. So you can come hear about the Dallas eclipse. And one of the anchoring desks is in Kerrville. So you should go and check out the NASA events on the Riverwalk in Kerrville. I'll have to get myself a free sticker as long as I'm here. I hear they're giving them out. Nice. I'm so thankful that you're able to spare some time and talk to me about this. I'm so excited about going. I'm so glad I'm going. I am really excited to get the word out to all of your listeners. I know that there has been a buzz in my community for years, and so I'm always a little gobstruck when I hear somebody like, oh, is there an eclipse coming up?

Like, oh my God. It's like, where have you been? But really, it's a chance to celebrate the sun, celebrate the Sun-Earth connection. So I'm just really excited for everyone here to take a moment on Monday, April 8th, and just experience that Sun-Earth connection for yourself. So ask bright people dim questions, because the explanations are stellar, Lemao.

Thank you so much to almost Dr. India Jackson, Dr. Michael Kirk, and all the folks at NASA Goddard who made this possible, including Abby and Sarah. For more on our two heliologists and heliophysicists and their info and social media, those are all linked in the show notes. There's also a link to NASA's Total Solar Eclipse Live broadcast for April 8th. And I'll be in Texas and I'll be back with a field trip episode of the whole situation. Am I going to be hitchhiking in the tumbleweed outer

reaches of central Texas? We'll see. Now, for kid-friendly episodes of Ologies, check out Smologies. That's S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Those are all linked at alleywar.com slash Smologies. They're in the show notes. They're G-rated, shorter versions of Ologies.

They're classroom safe. Also, look for an exciting announcement about a change we're making on May 16th. We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward on both. Allie has one L. Join the Patreon at patreon.com slash Ologies or get your Ologies summer merch at ologiesmerge.com, linked in the show notes. Erin Talbert, Admin Z Ologies podcast Facebook group. Avelin Malik makes our professional transcripts.

Kelly R. Dwyer makes the website. Noel Dilworth is our scheduling and travel producer. Susan Hale is the managing director and also did extra research and had a ton of fact checking. Jake Chafee is our assistant editor. Thank you, Jake. I'm sorry I said chaffee last week. I'm mad at myself. Welcome to the fam.

Lead editor who also assisted with research is the warm and bright Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I divulge a secret from my soul. This week, it's that I have 100% been a doofus in the past and looked directly at the sun during a partial eclipse by stacking like six pairs of sunglasses on top of each other and I'm now now I know that's not a good idea and I won't do that again.

Also when I was a kid there was this incredibly way spookier than it needed to be Disney movie called The Watcher in the Woods and Aaron Talbert, your Olliju's podcast Facebook group admin, who I have known since we were four. We watched it together on several occasions, and Bette Davis plays a very creepy woman who lives in a weird old house. And I guess also Kyle Richards, is it Kyle Richards or Kylie Richards? Anyway, is a real housewife of Beverly Hills,

but was a main character as a child actor. Also spooky. And an eclipse features heavily in the plot of Watcher in the Woods. And okay, first off, they don't make scary movies for kids like they used to, because this one straight up scarred my soul. But it also made me eerily fascinated with eclipses.

So I'm 100% rewatching it before I head to Texas to see how it holds up. I watched the trailer like five minutes ago, goosebumps, scared, actually scared. Watch her in the woods, gonna re-watch it. Ernie, you with me? I hope so, okay. Be safe, don't stare at the sun. I'm asking you that, I'm asking me that.

Okay, field trip incoming, bye bye. Hacodermatology, homology, cryptozoology, lithology, nanotechnology, meteorology, cryptophotology, nephology, seriology, pseudology. What's going on? Solar eclipse?