How the Solar Eclipse Could Help Us Solve a Mystery About the Sun
(World News Science)

You’ve been drawing the sun’s corona ever since you were in pre-K — and that’s probably the last time it made any sense. The sun is the 865,000-mile ball of gas that was the scribbly yellow circle in your drawing. The corona is the veil of luminous plasma streaming millions of miles into space, where you drew straight yellow rays. Things were never so simple again. Studying the mysteries of the corona is not easy, for the same reason that looking at the sun itself isn’t easy: the brilliance of the solar fires washes out everything else. Coronagraphs...