An X-Ray View of Last Week’s Solar Eclipse

Even if you were able to catch last week’s solar eclipse, you didn’t quite catch all of it. Most of the electromagnetic spectrum (light) is invisible to the naked human eye after all, and the Sun gives off a broad spectrum. It so happened that the Hinode spacecraft was in just the right place (hundreds of miles above the North Pole) at the right time to snag this x-ray view of the event.

The October 23 eclipse was what’s known as an annular eclipse. That is, the Moon’s apparent size (a function of the distance between Earth and the Moon at a given time) was too small to cover up the entire Sun. The result is the “right of fire” seen here.

Hinode’s X-ray Telescope (XRT) is the highest resolution x-ray solar observatory ever put into space. Its mission is the study of the Sun’s superheated outermost outer layer, the corona. This is where flares and solar storms come from.

“We are very interested in studying solar flares,” said astrophysicist Patrick McCauley, a member of the Hinode team, in a statement. “Flares are most dramatic in X-rays and we’re using the X-ray Telescope to better understand the physical mechanisms that drive flares so that they might someday be forecasted.”