The total solar eclipse could reveal more about the sun

The total solar eclipse, occurring on Aug. 12, 2026, in Spain and other parts of Europe, is bringing all the scientists to the yard. During a total eclipse, the moon completely covers the face of the sun, darkening the sky and revealing just the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona. That astronomical ring provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the sun as well as its effect on Earth.

Fellowship of the ring

Researchers around the world are investigating the eclipse in different ways. NASA is taking its research aircraft, the WB-57, to the skies with the mission of “chasing an eclipse, but in reality the eclipse is chasing them,” said The Guardian.

During the flight, the “pilot will aim to reach the point of greatest eclipse, when the largest fraction of the sun is obscured by the moon, at the moment the shadow catches up with them,” said The Guardian. The aircraft also contains four cameras to “take high-resolution images of the corona in several different wavelengths of visible and infrared light,” said NASA.

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The cameras will “capture at least 20 images per second” to “learn more about the formation of prominences (solar material that gets suspended above the sun’s surface), better understand the corona and how it gets heated,” and “investigate how material in the corona and the solar wind are related,” said NASA. Scientists at the European Space Agency will be studying the eclipse to learn more about solar winds.

NASA scientists in Iceland are also launching a “total of 80 balloons starting 18 hours before the eclipse until eight hours afterward to study how the eclipse affects Earth’s ‘boundary layer,’ the part of the atmosphere that touches the ground,” said NASA. In Spain, “three balloon teams will launch a total of six balloons with 360-degree cameras to image the eclipse shadow from above” to “measure levels of ozone in the atmosphere, which requires sunlight to form.” At Spain’s Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory, researchers are testing a new linear spectrometer prototype that “has a circular slit and can capture the spectrum of the entire corona at a certain distance from the centre of the Sun in a single photograph,” Federico Landini of the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin said to Reuters.

Return of the ring

From “our unique perspective on Earth during a total solar eclipse, scientists can study the sun’s corona in a way we can’t from anywhere else in the solar system,” Kelly Korreck, the eclipse program manager at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the NASA article. The sun “impacts our daily life, satellites and astronauts in space, and we can take advantage of this moment to advance our understanding of that influence.”

The sun’s corona extends about 6.2 million miles and is approximately one million times less intense than the surface. In noneclipse times, “scientists study the sun’s atmosphere with satellites equipped with a coronagraph,” which blocks out the sun’s surface, said the Agence France-Presse. However, total eclipses “allow them a rare glimpse of the chromosphere, the layer of atmosphere between the corona and the surface.”

We are “incredibly lucky” that the “moon is 400 times smaller than the sun,” as well as “400 times closer to us,” Allan Sacha Brun, an astrophysicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, said to the AFP. “Our work aims to understand the physical mechanisms underlying the sun’s activity” and “to put the sun back into context within its evolutionary timeline, from its birth to its death.”