Across the country, people took a moment out of their day on Monday to watch the solar eclipse.
West Virginia was no exception. The greens of the Mountainlair, West Virginia University’s student union, were completely covered by students and community members watching the sky.
Across the country, people took a moment out of their day on Monday to watch the solar eclipse.
West Virginia was no exception. The greens of the Mountainlair, West Virginia University’s student union, were completely covered by students and community members watching the sky.
Students like senior Claire Dursa made up the majority of the crowd. She works at the student union, and took advantage of her proximity to the event to come outside and see what was happening.
“If I’m correct with what I heard, I think the next one’s quite a few many years away,” Dursa said. “I think we’re going to enjoy this one as much as we can because you know that we won’t get to have this kind of experience for quite a long time.”
Jackson Taylor is a physics Ph.D. student at West Virginia University, and a graduate student assistant at the university’s planetarium. He said seeing the general public excited about astronomy makes the experience all the better.
“It’s great today, just the opportunity to reach so many people,” Taylor said “So many people are excited about astronomy. This is like astronomy day, it almost feels like. People are asking great questions. People are just having a great time.”
Taylor estimated more than a thousand people came to the Mountainlair, based on how many eclipse glasses were handed out.
“We gave out solar eclipse glasses, we gave out about 1100 to 1200 of them,” he said. “We ran out promptly, because there’s a lot of people here.”
Zach Tallman looks at the eclipse through a homemade pinhole projector April 8, 2024.
Photo by Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Event attendees were given the opportunity to view the eclipse through specially filtered telescopes April 8, 2024.
Photo by Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Taylor and others from the astronomy department set up solar telescopes looking at the sun, with special filters including a corona telescope, which lets viewers look at the sun through clouds. They also provided historical information about previous eclipses, including their scientific and societal importance through millennia of human observation.
Not everyone got a pair of eclipse glasses, but many were quick to share with friends and even strangers. Others like Zach Tallman took things into their own hands.
“I didn’t decide I was gonna watch the solar eclipse until this morning,” he said. “I was like nobody, nowhere is gonna have filters or glasses. I might as well just make something out of what I got here at my house.”
He made a pinhole projector using instructions from NASA and common household objects like a cereal box, aluminum foil and printer paper.
As the eclipse progressed, changes started to manifest even to the naked eye.
“You can definitely tell just looking out it’s definitely a lot dimmer,” Tallman said.
Close to the peak of the eclipse, a cloud started to make its way across the sun. For a moment, some in the crowd believed it to be totality, a complete covering of the sun that did not occur anywhere in West Virginia.
The cloud briefly allowed even those without eclipse glasses to see the crescent of the sun, filtered through the water vapor miles above.
“I’m seeing just a little tiny sliver of the sun, the rest of it is black,” said Jane Connor, who traveled up from Clarksburg. She knew an eclipse like this won’t happen until at least 2045, and that time far from West Virginia.
“It doesn’t happen very often,” Connor said. “So my daughter and granddaughter and I came up here today to experience it with a lot of people. It’s really exciting.”
In this composite image, six discs taken with a solar lens filter show the progression of the eclipse April 8, 2024.
Compositive image by Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Later Monday, a solar eclipse will draw a path across North America. Although West Virginia is not directly in that path, there are still amazing opportunities to safely observe a unique celestial event.
Later Monday, a solar eclipse will draw a path across North America. Although West Virginia is not directly in that path, there are still amazing opportunities to safely observe a unique celestial event.
Early in the afternoon, the moon will pass between the Earth and the sun blocking the light of the sun to observers. For those in the path of totality just north and west of West Virginia, they will experience a total solar eclipse.
“Totality means that the entire disk of the sun is covered,” said Susie Paine, a physics PhD student at West Virginia University, and a graduate student assistant at the university’s planetarium. “So it’ll be almost like nighttime in the day. Totality is rare. We won’t have totality in West Virginia, unfortunately, we’re getting like 95 percent of the sun covered by the moon.”
She said the path of the moon and earth actually produces eclipses fairly often. What makes Monday’s event special is just how many people in North America will be able to observe it without having to travel.
“The appearance of rarity is that most of the Earth is not a great place for humans to be in the middle of the ocean,” Paine said. “So most solar eclipses are not going to happen in a place that’s convenient for any particular person to see them.”
It really is a once in a lifetime experience. According to NASA, the next total solar eclipse that will travel across the lower 48 states from coast to coast is in 2045, but that will cross from California to Florida. A total eclipse like this isn’t going to come close to West Virginia for another 100 years.
But if you only know one thing before the eclipse, Paine needs it to be about safety.
“The big thing is buy and wear solar eclipse glasses,” she said. “I cannot stress this enough, wear eclipse glasses.”
Paine said the only time to safely look at the eclipse without protection is during totality, something that won’t happen anywhere in West Virginia. The risks of staring at the sun are no joke.
“It could cause cataracts which can cause other eye diseases,” she said. “If you look at it for too long, then you’re gonna go blind. So don’t do that.”
Eclipse glasses like these are a crucial tool to enable direct observation of a solar eclipse.
Photo Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
One of the safe ways to indirectly observe the eclipse, without looking directly at the sun, is a pinhole projector. A projector can be made with a simple piece of paper, a shoe or cereal box or even by holding up a colander to let the sunlight shine through the holes and onto the ground or a white sheet. As the eclipse progresses, you’ll notice changes in the pinholes of light.
“You’ll see a bite taken out of it,” Paine said. “Sort of like when the moon is waxing or waning, it’ll eventually look crescent. Then most of the sun will be obscured, and then there’ll be a bite on the other side, and that’ll pass away.”
Jackson Taylor is also a graduate student at WVU and also cannot stress enough the importance of safety when observing the eclipse.
“Just to reiterate, nowhere in the state of West Virginia will it be safe to view the eclipse without eclipse glasses. Nowhere in the state,” he said. “Even with the eclipse glasses, you should still give your eyes a rest. You shouldn’t really be looking at the sun for more than five minutes, even with eclipse glasses.”
Taylor said the eclipse offers scientists unprecedented opportunities to learn more about the sun.
“For astronomers, we love solar eclipses, because they block out the light of the sun, and it lets us see the outer solar corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun, which extends way past the actual visible part of the sun to our eyes,” he said. “Because it’s getting blocked by the moon, we’re able to see parts of the sun that we’re not able to see on any given day.”
Eclipses have led to incredible discoveries, including the element helium – helios is Greek for sun – burning in the corona, and even the confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
“The sun is the closest star to us so by studying our own sun, we’re able to study all the other stars,” Taylor said. “So if we’re not taking into account the corona for our own sun, our own star, then we cannot take it into account for the other stars that we’re studying.”
The public will benefit from that scientific fervor because even if it’s cloudy, Taylor said NASA will be live streaming the eclipse online. And Paine has one more parting piece of advice.
“Wear your eclipse glasses,” Paine said. “Just don’t look directly at the sun, the same rules that have applied every other day of your life apply on April 8.”
Dec. 21 marks the shortest day and longest night of the year for the Northern Hemisphere.
Dec. 21 marks the shortest day and longest night of the year for the Northern Hemisphere.
It is the start of astronomical winter, which lasts from the winter solstice to the vernal equinox around March 20. Astronomical winter is not to be confused with meteorological winter which encompasses December through February, the coldest months of the year. Nor should it be mixed up with solar winter, which is defined as the quarter of the year with the least amount of daylight and lasts from Nov. 6 to Feb. 3 in the Northern Hemisphere.
The exact time and date of the solstice changes slightly each year thanks to the planet’s tilt, as well as its elliptical, imperfect orbit around the Sun. It most often falls on Dec. 21, though sometimes occurs Dec. 22 and rarely can happen as early as Dec. 20 or as late as Dec. 23
The winter solstice occurs at the moment the earth’s tilt away from the sun is at a maximum. According to the National Weather Service in Charleston, the exact moment occurs Thursday night at 10:27 PM when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, located at 23.5° south of the equator. Daylight will start to increase after the solstice, and West Virginia will have a full extra minute of sun by Dec. 27.
Loren Anderson, a professor at the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, is studying the remnants of supernovas to better “understand the properties and dynamics of our galaxy.”
Their lifecycle is in millions of years, but stars in the Milky Way grow, produce heat and light and then they die. Some burn out in a spectacular supernova.
Loren Anderson, a professor at the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, is studying the remnants of those explosions to better “understand the properties and dynamics of our galaxy.”
News Director Eric Douglas, an admitted science and astronomy geek himself, sat down with Anderson to learn more.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: What is a supernova?
Anderson: So stars create energy, the process we know as fusion, where hydrogen atoms are combined into helium atoms, that’s the primary way. However, that process uses up the hydrogen in the stars. And eventually the stars run out. And at the end of their lifetimes, they kind of go on a frantic search for new ways to generate energy. But eventually those methods run out. And what happens is, during fusion, they kind of blow up, you know, the pressure from the generation of energy makes the star that’s present size. And then without that pressure, they collapse inwards and that collapse creates a rebound that leads to a supernova.
Loren Anderson, professor, astronomy, WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
Credit/West Virginia University
Douglas: So they literally explode, implode, and then explode bigger again.
Anderson: Without that initial explosion, what you said is correct. It’s generating energy, it’s stable. It’s producing the heat and the light that we need, but it’s going to run out and skip some of the very fast evolutionary steps, then it goes. Our sun will go through a different evolutionary path, however, so it’s only the most massive stars that do that explosion.
Douglas: An interesting thing I saw in the description of your research is that we know of about 300 or 400 of these supernovas that have happened. But, statistically, there should be about 1000 of them.
Anderson: Those numbers are only for our own galaxy — within the Milky Way. The supernova remnants, which after the explosion, there’s still some embers glowing, and we call those glowing embers, supernova remnants, but they only last a pretty short amount of time.
A supernova will go off and then it will relatively quickly become undetectable. That’s what leads to the relatively low numbers. They’re kind of hard to find. The fact that there’s many multiples more that should be discoverable, comes from studies of other galaxies, and comes from studying the population of stars that are in our galaxy that should explode to produce these things.
Douglas: Roughly speaking, we know there are X number of stars in our galaxy, compared to a similar-sized galaxy.
Anderson: That’s right. And just to be 100 percent clear, that’s not my research, that number comes from other people. That’s one method that is the strongest evidence for the number, but many people propose different methods and all of them arrive at the same answer that we’ve only found a fraction of what’s out there.
Douglas: Why is that important?
Anderson: It’s important just for understanding the type of galaxy that we live in. And so by mapping out all of these, we can learn about the massive star history of our galaxy over the last tens of thousands of years. We can put our galaxy in context of other galaxies in the universe. And also, there are a lot of interesting physics, none of which I do, but there’s a lot of interesting physics, of studying individual supernova remnants and understanding how that explosion progresses in time, and its interaction with the environment, all of that sort of stuff. Each one that we find is a new little laboratory for study.
Douglas: What’s the process for finding these remnant supernovas?
Anderson: It is surprisingly low tech. Essentially what I do is I bring up an image of a field of the galaxy, so a little part of the sky. And the data that I’m using for that are from the MEERkat telescope in South Africa, which is a 64 telescope array where all 64 telescopes work together to observe a patch of sky. It’s exceedingly powerful. We look at a little patch of the sky. And on that patch of the sky, we identify all the objects that are known to exist. And then I look for things that have a characteristic morphology of a supernova remnant, that are not known to exist yet.
No fancy algorithms. It’s just me and a computer monitor.
The lower two of these shell-like features are supernova remnants, with SNR G1.0-0.1 on the left and SNR G0.9+0.1 on the right. The uppermost shell is the Sagittarius D HII region, a site of recent star formation. SNR G0.9+0.1 has a pulsar wind nebula at its center, showing a tangled complex of radio emission. Polar outflows from this nebula appear to be distorting the shell of the supernova, particularly towards the north.
Credit/South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)
Douglas: Just to be clear, MEERkat is a radio telescope. How does it translate into a visual format? I’m not sure how that works.
Anderson: Oh, right. So your standard radio telescope, like the Green Bank Telescope, takes an observation of one location at a time. If you want to make an image, like the pretty images from Hubble or JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), you have to move the telescope to make an observation at each pixel. But an array of telescopes like Meerkat or like the Very Large Array in New Mexico, you can get something just like what Hubble gets. What I’m working with are complete images of little patches of the sky.
Douglas: How long does it take to go through one of these files?
Anderson: The full search, this particular data set that I was working with, covers more than 100 square degrees. And the full search took me probably on the order of four months, fairly dedicated work. That’s not to say that going through one time would not take much time, but there’s a lot of checks afterwards to make sure that something wasn’t discovered yet.
And what I try to do is do the search, and then wait a little while and then do the search again to make sure that what I’m finding is actually able to be repeated. That’s one thing that is not a strength of the eye method in that it’s very dependent on my brain, which is not the same as your brain or anyone else’s. And so what I find could be different from what another researcher finds. Repeatability is important in science and so I do what I can to maximize repeatability.
Douglas: How many galaxies are there? Do we know a rough estimate of how many galaxies there are?
Anderson: We have very rough estimates and it’s certainly more than 100 billion.
Douglas: One hundred billion galaxies? How many stars like ours are in the Milky Way?
Anderson: It’s all kind of nonsense. These are numbers that we don’t deal with in our daily lives. So the Milky Way has about 200 billion stars.
Douglas: Wow!
Anderson: So that’s two times 10 to the 11th. So a 2, followed by 11 zeroes. And I said, there’s at least 100 billion other galaxies. The Milky Way is a little bigger than average. I’d still say conservatively, there’s probably a 1 followed by 22 zeros other stars out there.
Douglas: Yeah, those aren’t numbers that we deal with?
Anderson: No, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I can repeat them to you because I do them academically, but there’s not a lot of context behind that.
It’s something like there’s more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches in the earth, something like that. You could look up the exact quote but it’s a phenomenal number.
Douglas:. What haven’t we talked about?
Anderson: Well, there’s two other parts. So the second half of the research, we’re going to be doing some machine learning. I have a collaborator in South Africa, and she’s going to take the objects that I’ve identified, and use that as – what’s called a training set, basically train the computer to look for similar objects.
It turns out that humans are really, really good at pattern recognition. And this is something that computers are not as good at as they are at other aspects of artificial intelligence. So she has an algorithm that she would like to try this machine learning on. And so we’ll use what I find as a training set to try to classify these objects, and hopefully find new ones. That part of the research is the most exploratory.
Douglas: And you’re also doing some STEM training too.
Anderson: We have this outreach program called SPOT. And in SPOT, the program ambassadors — so college undergraduates give science lectures to the public and to high school students, as a way of training the ambassadors in public speaking and in science communication, and also in engaging the next generation of scientists.
My other collaborator on this project, Catherine Williamson, will be developing a new SPOT module focused on supernova remnants. This will be a talk that the ambassadors can give to their audiences on supernova remnants.
On this West Virginia Morning, News Director Eric Douglas sat down with a West Virginia University professor studying the remnants of supernovas to learn more about our galaxy.
On this West Virginia Morning, News Director Eric Douglas sat down with a West Virginia University professor studying the remnants of supernovas to learn more about our galaxy.
Also, Inside Appalachia’s Mason Adams discussed water inequality with a Virginia Tech professor, recommendations to the Public Service Commission that could affect electricity rates and WVU released its final recommendations for cuts to programs.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
Last month, NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Able to capture six times more light than its predecessor, the Hubble, it’s the largest and most powerful observatory in space. Shepherd Snyder sat down with Shepherd University professor and astronomer Jason Best to discuss what the telescope’s launch could mean for both the scientific and education communities in West Virginia.
Last month, NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Able to capture six times more light than its predecessor, the Hubble, it’s the largest and most powerful observatory in space.
Shepherd Snyder sat down with Shepherd University professor and astronomer Jason Best to discuss what the telescope’s launch could mean for both the scientific and education communities in West Virginia.
Snyder: Getting started here, I just wanted to ask: what exactly is the Webb Telescope? Can you give me some history on what it is and why it matters in the world of astronomy?
Best: Certainly. Put simply, the James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built. In the late 1980s, NASA recognized that there would one day need to be a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which at that time was about a year away from launching. Through numerous conversations and collaborations in 1996, it was formally decided that there would be a next-generation space telescope. Starting in the early 2000’s, construction began on the various pieces of this telescope because it was going to be an incredibly sophisticated instrument. This all came together over a roughly 18 year period. The telescope was launched in December of last year, 2021.
Snyder: A few weeks ago, the Webb Telescope and NASA released some very interesting images of outer space that have been making waves, both in the scientific community and on the news. I was wondering if you could go over what these images are and why they’re so important.
Best: Certainly. The images that were released in July, were the first full color images and some of the spectroscopic data that came from the James Webb Telescope. It was a way to announce to the world that the general science operations of the telescope had begun. What’s fantastic about these images is that the five images released actually tell the story of what Webb can do.
Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO
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STScI
This image of Stephan’s Quintet shows the interaction between and among a grouping of five separate galaxies.
Snyder: Going back to the technology of the Webb Telescope, how is it an upgrade from its predecessor, the Hubble Telescope?
Best: The James Webb Space Telescope is really the successor, not only to Hubble, but in some ways to the Spitzer Telescope. The Hubble telescope, which is the space telescope that most people are familiar with, has a mirror that focuses on the radiation that comes in (to it). That mirror is approximately two meters across. The Webb Telescope, on the other hand, has a mirror that is about six and a half meters across. So that tripling in size gives you a much greater collection of radiation coming in (to it). And it allows you a greater sensitivity.
Furthermore, the Webb Telescope works in a different range of light. The Hubble Telescope works mostly in what we call optical light. It’s the type of light that we see with our eyes. The Webb Telescope works in what’s known as the infrared. The advantage of the infrared type of telescope is that it can see through the dust in space that would obscure light from Hubble. So it gives us a new window into the universe, it gives us a deeper window into the universe, it gives us greater sensitivity into the universe, it allows us to truly see farther, to see deeper and to see details that were heretofore unavailable to us.
Snyder: Now, you are an astronomy professor at Shepherd University. You’re very much involved in the school’s scientific community here. Just from your personal standpoint, as an educator, how would these images help further scientific education? Both in your local community here at Shepherd and also throughout the state, and even the country?
Best: The public has shown an interest in astronomy for decades, whether it has been the Apollo missions, the Voyagers which traveled past the edge of our solar system, the rovers such as Curiosity, which just reached its 10th anniversary on the surface of Mars. The public is interested in astronomy, because they’re interested in being able to see more deeply to understand the world around them. Whether it’s K-12 education, university level, or programs in the public, these images, and the images that will come from the Webb Telescope, will give us deeper insights into other worlds. And not only other worlds, but the worlds in our solar system. They will provide us with more detail. Webb will give us insight into the lifecycle of stars in a way that we’ve been unable to as yet understand. It will give us insight into galaxies over time, and how the large scale structure of the universe is established. And it will give us insights into the early universe, our beginnings.
Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO
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STScI
The study of the Carina Nebula, shown here, gives us deeper insights into how stars are born.
So I see, at all levels of education, these images helping to engage the curiosity in each of us. In terms of research, these areas of research are each going to be expanding the scales that we’re talking about, going from planetary scales on the smallest, to the universe on the largest. We have a range of astronomers, geologists and chemists. When you’re talking about other worlds, the understanding of biological processes, we have a range of research possibilities, those research findings, which will then come into the classroom and help students learn more about how their entire universe works.
Snyder: Could we see these images and the other data we’re seeing – and we could see in the future from the Webb Telescope – be used as an education tool, maybe outside of college or higher ed classrooms?
Best: Most definitely. We will see these images engaging the public. We have already seen these images engage the public through various outreach programs, both formal and informal. The public hungers to understand its world around it. We can look back to 2017, the first total solar eclipse that was visible in the continental United States in a generation and the public engaged. They traveled across the country so that they could be in that relatively narrow path where the eclipse could be seen. The public cares about its world, the public cares about seeing what’s happening around it. So not only within classrooms, scientists, educators of all sorts are extending the outreach mission that astronomy is known for. Historically, astronomy has been about research, it has been about teaching, it has been about outreach. Those avenues are simply going to be enhanced by being able to show these types of images, to be able to talk about the data coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, the analyses that are going to be conducted and that are already being conducted. We will see this as a larger part of our science, education mission.
Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
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STScI
These pictures of the Southern Ring Nebula display what will happen when stars of certain sizes are about to transition into the end of their life.
The public in the United States pays for science. That’s important to remember. NASA is a government agency. It’s funded by you, by me. It’s a public trust. And astronomers have always believed that it’s important to show the public what this investment means. Because in truth, discovery has no roadmap. Not only the data coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, but the technologies that will go into things like helping people with better eye correction, to be able to help with other resources that heretofore we haven’t thought about yet. Since discovery has no roadmap, it’s important for us, as astronomers, to engage with the public to show them what their investment means and why it matters so much to them.
Snyder: Do you think this is a stepping stone for more in depth astronomy research in the future? What sort of programs or initiatives could we potentially see being explored as a result of these images?
Best: In terms of how we look at astronomy research, we always build upon what it is we’ve seen before so that we can understand more in the future. Hubble, for a generation of scientists, has provided an incredible platform in terms of our understanding the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope builds upon that platform for planetary scientists, stellar astrophysicists, extragalactic astronomers, cosmologists, astrochemists, astrogeologists, across the spectrum of our science. The discoveries that we are making and will continue to make will allow our science to continue to grow, will allow our discoveries to continue to be understood within the greater context of what it is we know. And in truth, this tool will help us be smarter tomorrow than we are today. But that’s what science is really all about. We know something today. We hope to know more tomorrow.
Snyder: Just finishing up here, did you have any closing remarks before we go ahead and end this interview?
Best: I often tell my students that the first three words that any astronomer says are, “I don’t know.” The three words after that are, “Let’s find out.” The James Webb Space Telescope is going to help us find out much more than we knew. It will make the next generation of astronomers smarter than the current generation. And that’s how it’s supposed to work. Because then that generation will help the public know more, and appreciate more. And that’s how, as a society, we continue to grow positively in our knowledge.
