How the eclipse is bringing cutting-edge science to small town
There’s one stoplight in Kemp, Tex. About 1,200 people live in this city, roughly 45 miles southeast of Dallas. Asked what they do for fun, high school students shrug and mention the Dairy Queen.
But for 4 minutes, 17 seconds today, Kemp will become a scientific hot spot as the city is engulfed in the moon’s shadow during the total solar eclipse. To prepare, five high school students have given up their weekends and free periods for months to rehearse their roles in a grand, transcontinental, citizen-science project funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
The Kemp team, like 34 others scattered across the eclipse’s path, will take rapid-fire images of the sun in polarized light. Scientists plan to stitch together the data to create an hour-long movie of the spiky halo of the corona — the mysterious outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere that comes into view during totality.
It’s a big deal. The Kemp team is making custom eclipse T-shirts, modeled after swag from a major concert tour, with tiny Kemp highlighted alongside big cities such as Dallas and Cleveland. The students’ names will be included on a scientific study describing the results. And they’ll get to keep the equipment — which will be the foundation for a new astronomy club.
“We’re a really small town,” said Zoe Brooks, a senior who has been spending third period practicing on the telescope, pointing it out the window of a classroom. “We’ve never really had a chance to do anything like this. It’s part of why I’m so excited.”
••• ‘Nothing like this has ever happened’
The 2024 eclipse is arguablyan even bigger event than the last one to cross the country in 2017. Totality will sweep over major American cities, meaning an estimated 31 million people will be able to experience it simply by stepping outside.
But the beauty of an eclipse is that it doesn’t just hit the big cities. It will also touch spots like Kemp, offering residents there a chance to participate in the Citizen CATE (Continental-america Telescope Eclipse) 2024 project.
When Kyle Rimler, the science department chair at Kemp High School, signed up for Citizen CATE 2024, he had no idea of the magnitude of the project. But when he brought the students to a regional training at the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas, he saw a lot of adults. The Kemp team stood out because it was led by children.
It’s been a community effort. The Kemp students will be heading Site 7, bringing their telescope setup to farmland next to a gravel pit in the nearby town of Rosser, Tex. They secured access to the spot, which is even closer to the centerline of the eclipse than Kemp, with the help of their school’s assistant principal, Kasie Hodges, who put the team in contact with the landowner.
Billy House, a robotics teacher and an alum who graduated in 2008, sees the eclipse as a turning point for the students. He hopes that it will help open their eyes to opportunities that may seem impossibly distant.
“Nothing like this has ever happened in our town. This is a huge deal for us,” House said.
The same is true for Alejandra Martinez, a seventh-grade science teacher in Eagle Pass, Tex., a city on the border with Mexico. Martinez is also part of a CATE team and is excited to give her students a glimpse of what it’s like to collect data.
“I’m a big believer in: If the kids can see it, they can be it,” Martinez said. “Hopefully, this is going to open doors for them and they’ll see, ‘This is something I can do.’”
That’s a key part of Citizen CATE 2024, which aims toadvance public outreach in addition to solar science.
On the science side, it’s a major opportunity. Normally, eclipses give researchers only a fleeting, minutes-long glimpse of the corona, the scorching-hot outer atmosphere of the sun. Scientists can use instruments called coronagraphs to re-create eclipses and visualize this dynamic layer.
The eclipse offers a clear view of the middle corona, a zone that is typically hard to observe, where magnetic structures interact and help drive the solar wind. This stream of charged particles from the sun can cause geomagnetic effects on Earth, such as lighting up the auroras. On rare occasions, bigger bursts of particles from the corona aimed at Earth can mess with radio communications and even the power grid.
“If you’re at a single station on the ground, you’re only going to get a few minutes of observing, and that really limits what you can observe, especially if you’re trying to look for things that change on the sun,” said Amir Caspi, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who is leading the Citizen CATE 2024 project.
Scientists have also tried to keep up with the eclipse by flying planes in the path of totality, but CATE offers a different approach.
“You let the eclipse chase you, and you deploy a whole bunch of stations that are all identical, all along the eclipse path, and then the eclipse sort of does a bucket brigade,” Caspi said.