The beauty and astonishment of the eclipse is beyond doubt. But behind the scenes, astronomers work tirelessly to understand and predict these events.
Exmouth, a beautiful coastal town in Western Australia, will witness one of the most spectacular astronomical spectacles, a total solar eclipse, on April 20, 2023. This event has fascinated people for thousands of years, but determining when and where it will occur can be incredibly difficult, writes IFLScience.
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The sun and moon have always been attractive celestial objects to be observed in ancient cultures. Predicting the motion of the Sun is relatively easy, while it is much more difficult to predict the motion of the Moon. Earth’s satellite has phases, increasing and decreasing in apparent size, and moving erratically across the sky, making it difficult to accurately describe its orbit. In fact, explaining the motion of the Moon was the only problem that puzzled Isaac Newton.
Ancient cultures discovered that eclipses occurred at regular intervals, and many celebrated these events in their art and writing. During a lunar eclipse, the Moon turns blood-red when Earth blocks sunlight that would otherwise illuminate the full moon.
Such events are often associated with bad premonitions, and people wondered when the next event would happen. Various cultures around the world have independently discovered that power outages occur over an 18-year cycle, a phenomenon now known as the Saros cycle.
The Saros cycle shows how long it takes the Sun-Earth-Moon system to return to an almost identical triangular configuration. So if you’re watching a lunar eclipse, you can expect the next one, which will be visible from most parts of the Earth 18 years from now.
If you’re watching a total solar eclipse, you’re in luck, because they occur about once every 375 years in a particular region of the Earth. Unfortunately, the next total solar eclipse will take place in 18 years, but in a completely different part of the planet. After 54 years or three Saros cycles, the dim field should return to roughly the same location on Earth.
Worldwide, a total solar eclipse can be observed approximately every 18 months during one of about two possible “eclipse seasons” per year. Several repetitive Saros sequences overlap each other, each shifting at least six months, making them more frequent than the 18-year Saros cycle. Nearly 1,000 years later, when one long series of Saros ends, another begins in slightly different terms.
Our ancient ancestors could predict lunar and partial solar eclipses, but there is no conclusive evidence that they predicted the time and location of a total solar eclipse.
The Greek Antikythera mechanism, a complex 2,000-year-old mechanical device. It was used to predict the night sky and was able to accurately calculate an 18-year-old Saros. However, he couldn’t predict a total solar eclipse at a precise location on Earth—only when.
The first accurate prediction of a total solar eclipse (both in time and location) came in 1715 when Edmond Halley (famous for Halley’s comet) correctly predicted a total solar eclipse over his own home in London. He used Isaac Newton’s new theories of gravity and orbital mechanics to make this prediction.
Today, NASA uses an advanced form of an ancient technique called pattern recognition to predict solar and lunar eclipses over the next 1,000 years by resorting to 38,000 repeated mathematical formulas. Other than that, however, the Moon’s wobble and Earth’s erratic rotation make eclipse predictions less accurate.
Previously Focus He described how medieval records of lunar eclipses helped find climate changes on Earth due to volcanic activity.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.