Indian scientists predict look of elusive solar corona

A day before the Great American Eclipse is set to sweep the USA, Indian scientists have predicted how the solar corona – the mysterious outer region of the sun - would look like during the total solar eclipse.

Their predictions show lotus petal-like shapes extending from the surface in some parts of the sun’s corona, while in other parts, magnetic field lines fan out like spokes of a wheel.

The total solar eclipse on Monday (Aug 21, 2017) will last over the US landmass for nearly 90 minutes, giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to make scien javascript:; tific measurements from the ground.

NASA is supporting 11 ground-based science investigations, six focusing on the sun’s corona.

But days before the celestial spectacle, an Indo-UK team of researchers predicted the expected looks of the solar corona that will be visible during the eclipse. Normally the solar corona is not visible as it is fainter than the disk.

First prediction

The Indo-UK researchers, led by solar physicist Dibyendu Nandi from the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India at the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata is one of the two research groups that made a forecast on the solar corona pattern.

This is for the first time the IISER team predicted the shape of the corona.

The other agency is an US-based company named Predictive Sciences that is researching on solar corona for the last five years.

The Indian model used sun spot data up to August 16.

The scientists ran the model till August 21 before the prediction.