The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Freaky Eclipse Rituals, Cosmic Serendipity, Solar Mysteries

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Scientific American's Lee Billings and Clara Moskowitz join Rachel this week to talk all things eclipse. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get 20% OFF @honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod Right now, get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Head to https://FACTORMEALS.com/weirdest50 and use code weirdest50 to get 50% off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of

popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Clara Moskowitz. And I'm Lee Billings. Welcome to the show. It's so great to have you guys. Yay. Thank you. Listeners, both of our guest hosts today are from Scientific American. And there's a reason for that. It's that I am going to be hopping over to host Scientific American show Science quickly. In addition to the weirdest thing I'm this week. Don't worry. Weirdest thing is not going anywhere. But pretty soon, you will be able to hear me three times a week, which is as much as anyone would ever want to hear my voice, I think. And I would love to... Can't be too much, Rachel. Thank you. You're very kind. But I would love to see some of you weirdos over in the Science

Cookley Feed. So this is our little celebratory crossover episode to get you excited, to make sure that you go over and check that out. But for today, I am here with two excellent scientific American reporters who are frequently on science quickly. And we are all here to talk about the eclipse. That's right. It's pretty weird. It's a weird thing. It's weird. It does get weird. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering us. up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and

decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was in a chill, non-competitive way. Also, actually, before we get into the show, I do want to say, listeners, I made a call out last episode about how much I want to get like John and Hank Green and like Brennan Lee Mulligan on this show. And several of you are now like campaigning on the like nerd fighters Reddit. And it's really heartwarming to me. You're, you're being very flattering and I'm very humbled. And even if it does not lead to one of those people becoming a guest on the show, I love hearing from you guys. I feel like some of you, some of my. listeners think that my inbox is in undated and when they email me they're like very apologetic

about it you guys it's not I hardly hear from listeners and when I do it really I'm like oh right there are many of you so please never hesitate to send me a nice email I literally will always be happy to receive it and thank you so much did you just call it did you did you do a shout out to the was it the nerd fight subreddit is that what was that what it was that what's a thing the nerd fighters. Nerd fighters. Yeah. Okay.

I mean, because, you know, if we wanted to get John and Hank Green, we just got to cut a wrestling-style promo, right? John and Hank Green,

I'm coming for you. You think you're good science. This is you ain't nothing. You got to come hang out on this show with Rachel and have a throwdown. She'll come out the top turnbuckle and slam jam, you guys. Can you tell I don't really watch wrestling? I'm trying.

I'm trying. I honestly, you had me fooled. I thought it was a great, a great approximation. But listen, I think at this point, it's basically in the bag. So thank you for that. I do what I can. Anyway, now, now we can get to our teases. So my tease is that I want to talk about all of the ways that eclipses have freaked us out throughout human history. And some of them, some of these stories are terrifying. Some are heartwarming.

And they're all pretty weird because humans usually are. Clara, what's your tease? Okay. This is the most cosmically perfect time in the history of the universe. Wow. How's that? Wow. I love how that sounds.

I don't really feel that way. It doesn't be very constantly perfect. But I'm excited to hear how. Lee, what's your tease? The eclipse gives us a chance to understand the very profoundly, deeply weird behavior of the sun. Ooh, nice. Is that too much? Is that not enough?

I could go in more detail. I mean, is that enough of a tease? I feel like that's just like a little ankle. I'm not showing much leg. No, that's a perfect tea. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. A little amuse-bush is what we look for here.

So I'm very excited to hear both of those, but I have a rule that I never make guests go first. So since you are both fresh to the show, though hopefully I'll get you back pretty soon. But for today, I will kick us off. So yeah, I have just kind of an assortment of facts about how humans have interpreted, reacted to, runaway screaming from. eclipses throughout history. And I guess I should say before we get started, we should probably, in case listeners have like really been not paying attention to the news, God bless, there is an eclipse coming up very shortly.

What is it exactly? It is on April 8th. April 8th. April 8th. Thank you. See, over at Science quickly, they're on top of these things. And it's the last. It's the last eclipse.

Total solar eclipse. Outside of like a little tiny snippet of Alaska, like I think maybe in the Aleutian Islands or something, it's the last time anyone in the United States and really most of North America is going to be able to see a total eclipse until, is it like the, it's like a 2040. Yeah, it's a ways off. So unless you want to be part of the jet set and go some exotic locale, this is your best bet coming up in April. Yeah. So listeners, if you have not yet looked at a map of the path of totality, look at it and try to get to one of those places. It's very cool. I saw my first solar eclipse

back in 2017. Yes, that's when that happened. Yeah, me too. I went to St. Louis for it. Pretty unexpectedly, I hadn't planned on making a trip for it. And I was like, whoa, I'm, I'm eclipse-pilled. I'm very into this now. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. You may want to have a very slight addendum there very quickly, which is simply that you should look at the eclipse map, look at the path of totality that's going to sweep across the, you know, from Mexico all the way to Canada and then cry because pretty much everywhere in that path, you're not going to find an Airbnb. You're not going to find a motel. You're going to be lucky to find a piece of ground to sleep on in a sleeping bag. Exactly. By the side of a highway, if you're lucky, but you could do it. Fair enough. Good point. But it, you know, if you happen to. have an old like an old college roommate take a road trip i don't know like see if you can make something happen but it's true it it may already be too late but just don't freak out don't freak out when you see it because because people freak out sometimes yeah that's true and in fact all through

human history thank you thank you for that segue lee um so our oldest visual representation of a solar eclipse could be these fairly innocuous looking mounds of stone in County Meath, Ireland. This is called the Loughcrucerns. And these grassy humps, they date back to around 3,300 BC, which makes the cairn a good thousand years older than Stonehenge. And some research think that this is also a stone figure meant to represent astrological phenomena.

It features a lot of large stones with intricate carvings of like seemingly abstract shapes. There's a lot of spirals. It's very spiral heavy. I'll post a picture on popsight.com slash weird. And as always, that will also be on my Patreon. There's like diamonds, just a lot of a lot of scrawls. And most importantly, for our purposes, one of the Karen shows a very large carving of overlapping concentric circles, which is a very common visual representation of the sun being eclipsed

and then revealed by the moon. But can you really say a bunch of squiggles represent a solar eclipse? Then in 2002, an archaeo astronomer, great job, Paul Griffin, compared the age of the site to calculations of when solar eclipses should have been visible in the area. And he found a pretty good match. He found one that would have happened just around sunset on November 30th, 3340 BC. And he argued that the other symbols on the Karens might actually represent the stars that become visible due to the darkness created by the eclipse. Very cool, very evocative. Of course, some scientists like very strongly disagree with this interpretation. There's no written record to prove or disprove it.

That's kind of the issue with looking 5,000 years into the past. We can say confidently what was going on in the sky, a lot harder to piece together what was going on on the ground. I think the problem is that people, time travelers from the future, they go back and they're like trying to verify these things. And then they just get carried away with like their power trip. And they're just like, my God, eats your son, God. Bow before me.

when it happens. And then that's the last we ever hear of them because they go become leaders of some tribe in prehistory. Clearly. Yeah, it's true. Those time travelers, they never come back with anything useful to say. Yeah. But what's cool about this site is that archaeologists had previously noted the presence

of charred human remains from around 50 individuals. And they were placed in a basin just in front of the biggest carving. which of course, you know, suggests some kind of ceremonial sacrifice. And what's interesting about that? Yeah, yeah. Well, we're getting into the like, eclipses really freaked people out and how. There's evidence of human sacrifice perhaps being practiced in other parts of the world when solar eclipses occurred, even if it was otherwise uncommon. For example, the Inca people are thought to have fasted and offered up human sacrifices during eclipse.

which was not like kind of a regular everyday activity for them. They worshipped a sun god and that god was generally believed to be very benevolent. So, but eclipses, they were like, he's not happy. What can we do about that? All these fine travelers showing up saying that our sun god's being eaten, I guess they're on the chopping block. Now we know what happened to them. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. It's all coming together. Yeah. there are several instances in prehistory where there are carvings that people say, you know, maybe this was some kind of recording of an eclipse. I found one quote from a researcher saying, virtually any squiggle can be imagined to be a solar eclipse. So, you know, take that as a grain of salt. but there are some compelling petroglyphs in this nature in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, from 1097 there would have been an eclipse there. And then there were some more events there in the 13th century.

And those all happened right before. There was this mass exodus of peoples who lived in that region. and, you know, some astronomers and archaeologists are like, it's not necessarily that the eclipse made them leave. There's signs there was like a lot of drought. But you have to imagine that if things were bad and then there were like several eclips in a row, they maybe were like, oh. Yeah. Okay, we get it. And yeah, so I'll talk about a few other, you know, ways that people reacted to eclipses throughout history.

In 1200 BC, Chinese scribes recorded eclipses on tortoises and basically ox bones. And these were called Oracle bones. And there are some records where they literally wrote, the sun has been eaten. Very common theme. I'll get back to that. One thing that's interesting is that they were very blaze in the same kind of kind of time and place about lunar eclipses. They like said they were like common and it was like no big deal. And I guess it, you know, you can certainly imagine being freaked out by the moon

turning red, but it's like a lot inherently freakier for the sun to go away. Way freakier. Yeah. Looking at all of these things, I was like, it's easy to sort of be like, oh, you know, how silly. They thought the sun was being eaten. But I think it would actually be like, it would actually be very troubling for a human with no outside information to look up, see the sun disappearing, and be like, that's probably fine. I mean, I can't, I literally can't think of anything like more existentially terrifying. Yeah, yeah. I think about, you know, I've talked on weirdest thing about like the year without summer when, you know, famously, that's when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and, you know, there was this volcanic eruption that like really

messed with the climate and there was like there's there's no real sun it's cold the crops are dying and even then when some people had access to like the news i still think about how the everyday average person must have been like so the world is ending yeah right i mean i felt like that when i saw my first and i knew what it was and it's still like you're told what's going to happen and then it actually like gets dark and cold suddenly in the middle of the day and the sun manifestly has been eaten and you're like, oh my God, I can't handle this. What like you have this sensory reaction of utter terror. Right. And that's when you fully know exactly what is happening and why. Yeah. I think anyone who like scoffs too much at these ancient theories about eclipses has like

probably never seen a total eclipse because it's really intense. So, yeah, in China, they believed that a dragon ate the sun. And so what they would do is they would bang drums to scare away the dragon. And you got to think about the fact that it always worked, you know? This one always came back. So they were on to something. Yep, yep. Yep.

Yeah. And similarly, ancient Hindu mythology involved a dragon, but it's kind of a more elaborate story. There's this legend that a demon

that was in the form of a dragon wanted to get an elixir of the gods to become immortal. And so the demon disguised itself as a woman, but then was discovered and then was beheaded as punishment. But

the demon had managed to take a sip of the elixir before getting beheaded. So its head is now immortal and is in relentless pursuit of the sun. And so it swallows the sun, but it has no neck. So the sun comes right back out, the back of its head. People are so creative. I'm in awe. In West's In western Siberia, it was said that a vampire tried to swallow the sun and then it was hot, so he spit it out. In Bolivia and in Korea, there were similarly fire dogs that were sent to steal the sun, but then couldn't keep it in their mouths because it was too hot. Again, like, makes sense. It gets eaten. They spit it back out.

The sun being eaten, again, really common theme. I think it makes sense when you think about the way the sun gradually grabbed. disappears as it's eclipsed. Chokta legend said that it was a mischievous black squirrel. And they also believed that you needed to frighten it away with loud noise. There were also some tribes that would shoot arrows into the sky to reignite the sun, which again, like genius. Worked every time. Given the available data. And yes, worked every time. The Pomo people of Northern California envisioned a great cranky bear ambling through the heavens and biting the sun when it didn't move out of the way. I think that's my favorite.

In Norse mythology. That's my favorite so far. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Because there's no, it's no malicious intent. It's just a bear just ambling around trying to get along. All of a sudden, the sun's in the way.

What are you going to do? You're going to bite it. Get out of the way, son. Yeah. Looks biteable. And. And yeah, in Norse mythology, there's another sun eating legend involving Loki. Loki fathered, among other things, a god-slaying giant wolf, which then had its own children,

the wolves, Skull, and Hattie. And then in the end times, Skull is going to eat the sun. But I guess he's trying and failing every time there's an eclipse. He's for hers. Yeah, exactly. He's practicing. He's spitting it out. And then getting away from eating.

Sometimes another very common flavor of Eclipse myth is that the sun is, we've done something bad to make the sun go away. There's a Transylvanian folk tale where the sun is like so horrified by humans' behavior that it goes away. and then it sends a toxic dew down. Because dew does often appear during eclipses because of the temperature drop. There's just a burst of condensation. It's not poisonous, of course. But they did not trust the sky do, which I guess, again, it's a fair thing. In Suriname, there was a tribe that believed that the sun and moon were brothers,

and they were having a really violent fight during an eclipse. So like one of them got punched out, basically. There was also a, I think, I believe a West African, a couple of groups that believed that when humans fought too much, the sun and the moon would start to fight because they were just like the vibes have become so toxic. And so during an eclipse, it was their practice to make amends for old feuds and rivalries because you had to make peace to encourage the sun and the moon to also make peace. And again, it worked every time.

Yes. So I love that some of these actually had like a pretty positive spin, including there are several Aboriginal groups in Australia where the sun and the moon are not fighting at all. They're actually in love. And when they get together, they want a little privacy. So you have the eclipse. And some of these groups actually think that the stars that you can see in the darkness of an eclipse are the children that result from that union, which I think is very lovely. And there were some cultures that worshipped the moon and they celebrated the solar eclipses as brief total victories over the sun.

Again, very fair. I like the emotional arc of all of these because, like, for everybody who thought it was like this retribution or this doom or something awful had happened, like, imagine that feeling. And then like three minutes later being like, oh, few, I guess we're not that bad after all. I guess we're not being doomed to eternal torment. Exactly. And, you know, similarly, it's, it's, I mean, there is kind of maybe a survivor's bias here. We're like, there are probably some subpar stories too in explanations. You know, someone's just like, oh, yeah, that's just, The sun just got tired, turned off for a little bit. And those don't come down to us because they're not super compelling, right? So I think that you do see this reflection of ourselves and what really appeals to us and makes us tick in the stories we tell about these sorts of things. And it's interesting to see how, you know, some of these, some of these kind of had really some pretty big nuggets of truth. The sun and moon are fighting. You know, that's maybe how I would describe it to some prehistoric tribes person.

I just like, that's what's happening. Man, I'm not going to tell you about angular. diameter and stuff and and you know serial time. So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, ancient people did often have like, you know, what might be a surprisingly good understanding of what was going on in the sky. We know that, of course, the Maya and the Aztec people did learn to predict eclipses

using math that I won't get into because I don't feel like it. But there will be links to more info on pops out.com slash weird and on my Patreon. But the long and short of it is that they were able to calculate when eclipses would most likely happen. That being said, they didn't know where they would be. And eclipses can be visible in very small parts of the world and not in others. So it's pretty complicated to actually, you know, predict where one would happen, but they did start to know when they would happen. So the long and short of it is that ancient people did eventually learn to predict eclipses and then, you know, figured out that they had something to do with shadows and then more specifically the moon. And here we are now.

with the ability to know exactly when and where eclipses will appear and even like exactly how long we'll have in totality at a given point, which is so incredible. And yet they will still be really freaky when you see them happen. And I think that's awesome. I think so much has changed and also very little has changed about the human experience of the eclipse. Cool. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more weird facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest.

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Sephora Collection. It's full coverage with a matte finish and perfect for any look, whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touch-ups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. Okay, we're back and Lee, tell us how little we know about the sun, I guess, or are we going to learn more? I don't know. You know, I got to say I don't entirely understand all the reasons why we don't entirely understand the sun or this aspect of the sun I'm about to talk about because it does get pretty complicated. However, the gist is that there is something around the sun called the corona. And you see it very prominently when the moon slides into almost perfect position over the sun to block its light, block its disc.

And it reduces all the glare. And all of a sudden this thing, this wispy, ethereal, almost misty thing. can be seen with many tendrils all around the sun. That's the corona. It is superheated, or I don't know if it's actually technically superheated, but it's very hot plasma, rarefied gas, ionized gas, and it can be millions of degrees in temperature, whether you're looking at Kelvin or Celsius or Fahrenheit,

millions of degrees in all cases. And what's really weird is that the sun's surface, it's visible surface or, you know, it's a photosphere, and there's a little transitional link called the chromosphere. It's kind of in between the corona and, the photosphere, whatever. It is not nearly that hot. The surface of the sun is only thousands of degrees,

a couple thousands of degrees. And then we have this super duper, much hotter thing around it. And people can't really figure out how the energy gets from point A to point B, so to speak. And to be clear, it's not so much that, oh, we just don't understand. It's just a fundamental mystery. We'll never know. It's not that. Tad goes in.

Tad goes out. You can't explain that. What it is is that there are multiple different plausible mechanisms. by which this could occur, and it's really hard to discern between them, but the best time to look, the best time to try to discern is during an eclipse because that's when you have the moon in the way blocking on all the glare and you can see the corona and eruptive prominences of plasma that are entrained in huge magnetic loops submerging from deep within the sun, so on and so forth. And so you can test these different theories. I don't know if we're ever going to get resolution on it, though, but it is very weird. Very weird indeed. The reason why it's weird is just because we don't fully understand why. it's so freaking hot. And, you know, to be clear, it's hot in a kind of a kinetic or thermodynamic sense, which what I mean is is that if you stuck your hand out in there, in the corona, you probably wouldn't feel too much or what you'd really feel is just your skin going,

ah, from the radiation, the luminosity of the sun itself way deeper down. But it's rarefied. It's very, very, it's not dense. If it's a soup, it's very, very, very dilute. But every single little particle in that of plasma in the coroner. is moving very fast, which translates to being very hot. And so, again, they don't understand why they being the scientists, you know, scientists types.

They don't really understand why and how this energy transfer takes place. You know, I've never gotten a satisfactory answer. Maybe one weird aspect of this is I've never understood quite why it's so weirdly hard to explain because I've never gotten a satisfactory answer kind of about the so what question. It just seems to be one of these things where it's like, well, that. That is kind of weird. Then did you find $5? What happened after that, Mr. Heliophysicist?

Because it doesn't really seem that gaining this knowledge is going to somehow move the needle on anything as far as I can tell. And, you know, look, I'm a firm subscriber to the idea that the best way to get the right answer to something is to confidently propose the wrong answer in a public forum. So please, readers, someone who's actually Heliofidicist, explain to me, show me why this matters. than just inherent coolness. I'm all about inherent coolness. But yeah, I guess I don't quite necessarily see the newsworthiness of it. I'm sorry, heliophysicist. I really love you.

I really want to love you. But, you know, big, dumb rocks like planets are so much cooler. Hey, speaking of which, can I, can I have a bonus? Can I throw a bonus weird thing in here real quick? Oh, please. Yeah, we love bonus weird things. Okay, so one thing that I really jam on hard with eclipses is not just solar eclipses. It's stellar eclipses.

So what are we mean by that? We're talking about, I'm not saying sun or solar, we're saying stellar. So we're talking about other stars. One of the coolest ways that we find planets these days is basically eclipses. We call them transits. It's when a planet transits crosses the face of its star is seen from Earth and casts a little shadow towards us here, just like how the moon crosses the face of the sun and casts a shadow to Earth on a much smaller scale. And we're talking, you know, these planets, usually when they pass across these stars, you know, they're thousands of light years away. they dim the star usually less than like a window pane is going to dim the light passing through it.

It's remarkable that we can even detect this stuff. But what's even more remarkable is that we can use that eclipse, that stellar eclipse, that transit to do things like sniff out signs of life on Earth-like planets and so on and so forth. And of course, folks are really excited about doing that with the James Webb Space Telescope and other resources and other facilities that can look at these transits very closely over time and see. the little tiny smidgen of starlight that shines through the little limb, the little, you know, tremulous, bearest whiff of atmosphere that might be around this rock, this orb, and they can see basically, you know, some of the gases and some of the chemistry there. That, to me, is super duper weird and that we can do that. And moreover, that while we do that, somewhere out there, if you think about the ecliptic plane, which, by the way, during eclipse pops out beautifully, if you ever go see an eclipse, one thing you'll notice that people don't tell you. about is that it gets all dark. You see the corona. And then you see all the planets just in the straight line on each side of the of the sun, the other planets in the ecliptic plane, the big kind of remnant of the disk from which we all formed. Well, what that means is that anything that's along that ecliptic plane from far away is seeing us in transit from some geometrical viewpoint.

And I just kind of, every now and then I'll just kind of make my brain effervesce thinking about that, about how, you know, maybe somewhere out there, you know, in some other nearby part of the Milky Wave, some, you know, some three-eyed, green-skinned alien is looking through their telescope and seeing this little tiny dot, this little diminution in light, and they're maybe sniffing and seeing its atmosphere, that's us. That's cool. Yeah, that's really fun. Yeah, I love, I love that you brought transits in because I feel like the period of my life is a science journalist where I was writing the most from day to day was when Kepler was really just like churning out.

Yeah. Turn it out planets. And I always thought it was so cool how much stuff we could learn from really just little eclipses happening somewhere else. Little eclipses. Yeah. Well, if anyone's looking at us out there, I, I think they're not too horrified. by what they find.

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who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Okay, we're back. And Claire is going to tell us about the amazing cosmic coincidence that is our existence and also eclipses.

Please explain. Totally, totally. So I described in my teaser as this being the cosmically most perfect time in the history. time in the history of the universe. I just want to clarify, a lot of things are going really badly at this time, but cosmically, I should say, celestially, in terms of what we can see, this is the perfect moment, because the fact that we can see eclipses at all is just this complete coincidence. It's not guaranteed. Not only is it not guaranteed, it's really not very likely. You can't see eclipses from any of the other rocky planets in our solar system. Just a lot of

things have to go completely right to make what we're going to see on April 8th possible. So if you think about it, we have the face of the moon coming in and perfectly blocking out the face of the sun, which is weird because the moon and the sun are really not the same size at all. And they're also really not the same distance at all away from each other. And it just so happens that the sun is 400 times larger than the moon, but it's also 400 times farther away from Earth. And it all works out just completely perfectly so that they are the same size on the sky. And that that way, you don't get this ring of the sun around a smaller moon, making it just kind of not a cool site. And you also don't block out the corona, which is what makes an eclipse so cool. Like you get to see the corona, but not the face of the sun, which certainly wasn't guaranteed to happen. So, yeah, not only is it just an amazing spectacle, but it's also this cool scientific opportunity, as Lee was talking about, for us to really learn about the atmosphere of the sun. So the fact that that this happens is due to a number of factors, right? One of them is that,

Our moon is actually pretty large for a moon compared to the size of Earth. No other rocky planet in the solar system has a moon big enough to cause a total eclipse. And we're just, you know, the whole story of the moon is just this crazy, crazy event that took place that could have nearly destroyed our planet entirely. Like it could have tipped either way, right? You know, we could have have absolutely nothing or we could have had this really awesome moon that makes our life on this planet possible and also makes eclipses possible. And that's what we got. Tide goes in, tie goes out. Can't explain that. Exactly. Right. So speaking of the tides, so the tides are a result of this, you know, the moon tugging on the earth. And they're actually destabilizing the dynamic. of our orbit, the Earth's orbit and the moon's orbit, so that the moon is gradually getting farther and farther away from Earth. So this isn't going to be possible in the far future, and it wasn't possible in the far past, because obviously the distance between the Earth and

the moon is critical to achieve this perfect matching up of size on the sky. So if you zoom out 620 million years into the future, the moon will have drifted far enough away from the Earth that you'll only see partial eclipses. You'll not ever be able to see a total eclipse of the sun at that point. You know, who knows if we'll still be around or care anymore. But it's worth noting that be glad you live now and not 620 million years into the future. You know, and then billions of years ago, of course, when the moon was much closer to Earth, eclipse is probably also the moon was too big. So it blocked out the corona. So you just, you know, it wasn't quite the show, the spectacle that it is now. Just dark. Just terrified. Yeah. Right. Not cool.

Just dark. All those single-selled organisms were terrified. Let me tell you. So, yeah. And then furthermore, as Lee says, it's also quite rare to have these because this has to do with the way Earth's orbit is actually offset from the plane of the moon's orbit. The moon's orbit is tilted five degrees away from the tilt of the plane of the Earth's orbit. And if the two match, then we would actually have a total solar eclipse every time we had a new moon. You know, it would just completely block it once a month, and we would be like so ho-hum about it, which might actually be cool. We would, you know, all get to see this all the time. But it's special because it happens rarely because of this

orbital mismatch. So things have to line up, you know, just in this amazingly perfect way. And also, since most of the Earth's surface is covered in ocean, when they do happen, it's usually someplace where people can't see it. So that's why you have to wait two decades to see the next one over North America after this one if you miss it because it's just it's just not a usual occurrence so many things have to line up just right all the more reason to go um pitch your tent on the side of highway we're in Texas and take your shot yeah and speaking of taking your shot now is a great time to remind people to not stare directly at the sun even when it's hiding behind the moon, it will mess you up. Get eclipse glasses. They're not regular sunglasses. They're different.

They're better. You could use welding shields if you have those lying around. But if not, you need to get some special eclipse glasses. Or if you're really out of luck and you have not found one, I highly recommend, first of all, you can Google just like how to make a little contraption to watch the sort of shadow of the moon over the sun. Or you can just look at the ground because like that thing happens. There's probably a name for it. But like the shadows. Everything. Yeah. Well, yeah, shadows. The shadow people come. No, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. But specifically the shadows are all like cool little like, you know, Crescent. slivers. It's very fun.

Right. The last time I saw an eclipse, I kind of split my time looking up through my eclipse glasses and looking down at the shadows being cast on the ground. So all I'm saying is, if you really miss the boat on getting eclipse glasses, don't be like, I guess I might as well look up at the sun and burn

my eyeballs. There's other stuff you can do. Yeah, just look at the ground. Look at the ground. No, but I mean, for real though, but that's what's so crazy, right, is the richness of the experience across so many different sensory aspects. It gets colder. Your color perception changes as the light diminishes so quickly. Your rods and cones are going haywire and your retina. Just what? And so things that, you know, the reds and the oranges fade away. The blues and the greens come to prominence could even get a purplish tinge to them, a lavender hue. Sometimes people call it silver. And, you know, the animals get quiet. They get loud. It is a full spectrum experience. And so there's no wrong way to do it, except. And, you know, the animals get quiet. They get loud. It is a full spectrum experience. And so there's no wrong way to do it. as you said, to stare up directly at the big glowing ball in the sky. Please don't do that.

And apparently, I heard that this is like a common misconception that some people believe, you know, oh, well, so when the eclipse is at its most intense, when the eclipse is happening, that's what I can't look, right? So, but if it's a partial eclipse, cool, I can kind of look up real quick and kind of just, you know, get the real quick after image of just a little crescent bitten out of the, you know, out of the sun and consequently out of my retinas. but whatever you do, don't look straight at the eclipse when it's actually

taking place and you see the corona and it's the exact opposite, right? So you can't do it wrong except just don't, you got to use protection. You really do. Unless it's the totality, in which you totally can just look at it with your bare naked eye and it's safe because there's no sun.

Yes. The corona doesn't hurt your eye. But you have reminded me to pack my colander. I was going to forget when I'm putting it in my suitcase. Colanders are the perfect little thing to use to get those cool, wiggly, weird shadows on the brand. Yes.

Totally. Awesome. Well, thank you both so much for joining. Listeners, you can catch some more eclipse-related content and just awesome other stuff over at Scientific American Science Quickly Feed, which again, I will soon be hosting at. So get on over there. Subscribe, rate, review, et cetera.

And I'll see you. over there soon. And Claire and Lee, thanks again so much. Thank you all. And like, like Rachel said, we will not kidnap her from this. Like, you know, she's going to keep doing this. But we are going to, we're going to be using her a lot, right? So you guys really do need to come over to this other place. Like, it's going to be real cool. It's going to be party over there. Free booze. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bode, who also serves as our audio engineer and Editor Extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions,

suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Now. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts,

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