It is through eclipses that solar secrets are being revealed to astronomers, and scientists are hoping to gather vital information from the upcoming total solar eclipse that will be visible from the United States on Aug. 21.
Among these experts is Shadia Habbal, an astronomer and professor at the University of Hawaii, who has travelled to various parts of the world to witness this phenomenon and learn from it.
"Every eclipse, or [even just an] eclipse image, has given us new discoveries about the sun," she told Space.com. "Even if you have only a few seconds or a few minutes of totality, you can get something new."
This is said to be Habbal's biggest campaign.
With the support of NASA, she and a team plan to capture images of the eclipse form five different locations throughout the U.S. in an effort to gather data that could help them understand why the sun's corona rises to such high temperatures.
By observing the eclipse form multiple sites, Habbal said her team could observe small changes in the corona through a new filter, which will allow them to measure temperature and distribution of ionized elements (when elements lose different amounts of electrons at different temperatures), Quartz reported.
"We have found that when [we observe the corona through] different filters, we get temperature maps of the corona," she said, according to Quartz. "It gives you an idea of the distribution [of heating], but we still don't know the mechanism but if there is enough here it will tell us something about a concentration of an element that we haven't seen before."
Habbal is not the only astronomer hoping to learn something from the upcoming eclipse.
NBC4 Washington noted that about $7.7 million was being spent between NASA and the National Science Foundation on the eclipse.
Additionally, hundreds of everyday people hope to conduct their own experiments on the day.
"Millions of people can walk out on their porch in their slippers and collect world-class data," Matt Penn, an astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, told NBC.
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