Case 4: Understanding the Sun
- What is the solar corona?
- Why does the sun have a corona?
- Can General Relativity be proved?
- Are there other planets or unknown bodies revolving around the sun?
Though sun spots were first observed by Galileo in 1610, the nature of both sunspots and the solar corona fascinated and mystified astronomers through the early nineteenth century. With the advent of astrophotography, astronomers could carefully observe and record these phenomena. In the carefully observed drawing by Langley the sun spot looks like a dark opening in a dense set of fibers. In Trouvelot's illustration, the sun spots resemble holes surrounded by muscle tissues. In both images we see careful observation of the visually available information: an interruption of the surface; a darker center surrounded by areas of movement. These images reflected and informed Edward Holden's thinking about the sun: both Trouvelot and Langley were in correspondence with the astronomers at the Lick, sharing sketches of their observations, and Holden pasted a copy of Langley's Sun Spot engraving into his scrapbook.
Similarly, the sketches astronomers made of the corona at this point in time accurately record the shapes of the corona, but fail to understand the forces behind it. Edward Holden, the founding Director of the Lick, hypothesized that the "coronal filaments were produced by streams of meteorites falling into the sun." John Schaeberle, the astronomer who designed the 40ft camera used on the majority of the eclipse expeditions, proposed that the coronal forms were "produced by volcanic forces emanating from the sun spots."
