What can solar eclipses teach us about the Sun and its interaction with Earth’s atmosphere? This is what a recent press conference at the 2024 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union sought to address, as a team of scientists from the Citizen CATE 2024 (Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse) project reported results obtained on April 8, 2024 . Total solar eclipse over North America.

“Scientists and tens of thousands of volunteer observers were stationed throughout the moon’s shadow,” said Dr. Kelly Korreck, NASA program manager for the 2023 and 2024 solar eclipses. “Their efforts were a crucial part of the big heliophysics year – helping us learn more about the Sun and its effects on Earth’s atmosphere when our star’s light temporarily turns off disappears from view.”

The large Citizen CATE 2024 team consisted of a combination of professional scientists and citizen scientists and used a combination of imagery, spectroscopy and amateur radio. It made groundbreaking observations of the 2024 solar eclipse and determined how radio signals were affected during the eclipse. In the end, the team of more than 800 people discovered that eclipses produce atmospheric gravity waves, or waves within Earth’s atmosphere. In addition, the amateur radio operators, consisting of more than 6,350 people, found that radio communications both inside and outside the total orbit of the eclipses improved at frequencies between 1 and 7 megahertz, while communications deteriorated at frequencies above 10 megahertz.

While this total solar eclipse that crossed the United States provided groundbreaking scientific insights into how the Sun interacts with Earth’s atmosphere, the next total solar eclipse that crossed the United States will not occur until August 23, 2044.

What new discoveries will scientists make during solar eclipses that will help us better understand our Sun in the years and decades to come? Only time will tell, and that’s why we do science!

As always, keep up the science and keep looking up!

Sources: National Science Foundation, EurekAlert!

Selected image credits: B. Justen, O. Mayer, M. Justen, S. Habbal and M. Druckmüller