Super Solar Storms with Lika Guhathakurta

26:53Neil deGrasse Tyson:So in the comedy worlds, they say you were punching up. We are punching out. Out, out. Punching out. Yes. Yes. So they are in the interstellar medium. And, you know, this boundary, just like we learned that the alpha and surface boundary, we learned with Parker Solar Probe, that we used to think of it as a spherical surface. That's what we scientists do. We start with the simplest assumptions till, you know, observations tell us something else. Well, it's the same thing here. This, because the two Voyager spacecraft went in two different directions, latitude, we know that the heliosphere is not a symmetric boundary, basically.

27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:So it's a little closer on one side than on another side. Yeah. And they respond to the solar wind pressure, magnetic field. And this heliosphere is really our home. It protects us from the harmful cosmic radiation from the interstellar medium. So technically, the heliosphere is the solar system. Don't be so planet biased about it. Yeah, thank you. Well, you know, we don't. You know, it's a star's environment. I mean, other stars have environment bubbles. They are called astrospheres. So this is sun's. Okay, so what about the magneto pause? Is that the sign of going through like a change of life?

28:32Magneto pause? We pause. We pause. I'm going through magneto pause. It's hot. I am so hot. Oh, magneto pause is killing me. You pause there, you get your breath, then you keep moving on.

28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:But these boundaries tend to have the word pause in them. if I remember my vocabulary. Yes, they do. And so basically what, so magnetopause is kind of used in reference to Earth's magnetosphere. Heliopause is in reference to Sun's magnetosphere, which is the heliosphere, et cetera. But what they're trying to do, they essentially describe physics laws, right? So, you know, is it gravity dominated? Is it pressure dominated? Is it magnetic fields sweeping out? Those are the conditions that these boundaries define. I remember the day it was reported when the Voyager 1, I think, exited the heliosphere.

29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's the heliopause at the end. And we were all excited, but we asked, well, how does it know? And so it has these sensors on board that knows where the sun is because of the sun's influence on them. But then you reach a point where the sensors went haywire. Right. And they couldn't find the sun. Couldn't find this, didn't know which way the sun was. Because the sun's influence was dropping while the galactic influence was rising. There's a point where they were about the same. And you could no longer uniquely point which way the sun was. We say it has left the solar system. It's left the solar system.

30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, yeah. That's pretty cool. It's like a compass needle behaves, right? Right. Yeah. You know, if you take it to the North Pole, what will it show? Yeah, which way is it going to point? Yeah, well, I think it just points every way. It goes haywire. Every way you can. If you were to personify that, oh my gosh, I don't know. I am without direction in my life. Right. Yeah, for the first time. So when you look at the heliosphere, okay, and then you get to the pause, and now you have the galactic influence, right? Okay. Now, is the gravity of our star still influencing anything beyond that point as well?

31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, that's a simple thing. The gravity goes forever. Goes forever. Forever. Chuck, you are so smart. My God. Nobody dare bring up such questions. Well, thank you. Awesome. So the sun's gravity extends forever. but so does Earth's gravity. Right. So does the moon's gravity. Right. So all that really matters to you is that somebody else's gravity that's dominating where you are. Gotcha. And we exploit that when we go to the moon. We only give the spacecraft enough energy to get to the point where the moon's gravity takes over. Gotcha. And then it falls towards the moon. Gotcha. I don't need...

31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:You don't need anything more than that. I don't need rocket fuel to fall towards the moon. Yeah. So at that point, of course, Earth's gravity is still there. But it's dominated by the moon's gravity when you're close enough to the moon. Gotcha. So that's where it's the gravity thing. So our sun's gravity, now here's it. Is there something that could fall into the influence of our sun's gravity so far out that it pulls it into our solar system? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let me say, oh, yeah. Well, isn't that subject for another topic? That's another topic. Another show. That's another show.

32:25Okay. A lot of controversy attached, but it's kind of fun. It's really fun because we are beginning to look everywhere. And what we had taken for settled signs is very unsettled.

32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Ooh, love that. And unsettling. And that too. But may I, you know, heliosphere is my favorite thing, right? May I add a couple of more? Please, please. Please do it, right? Because you were instructed to say everything there is to know about the heliosphere. That was your instructions. So please proceed. So heliosphere literally partly shields the planets from galactic cosmic radiation. And so before you reach interstellar space, you first have to leave home. And that is our home. And two thoughts as I was thinking about this topic when I said bubble magnetosphere is a bubble or a cocoon and same thing with sun's magnetosphere, which is the heliosphere.

33:30This is like a bubble within a bubble within a bubble and it takes me to a fractal zone. It's like nature kind of knows how to replicate a good thing. I kind of want to embed that idea. This is how, you know, stars have astrosphere. So everything you look around has this zone of magnetic field that we can't see, we can't touch. Okay. And so my final comment to you is that you live inside a star's gigantic magnetic embrace. It keeps you safe. Do not forget that and thank it. Look at that. That's pretty cool. Now, it makes perfect sense that people used to worship the sun.

34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because they knew. They knew. They knew. They knew more than we did. They were like, hey, man, that thing is keeping us safe. All right? We need to show it a little respect. So, Lika, catch me up on the Parker Solar Probe. Because last I encountered it, I was telling everybody about how it achieved a speed record for any human-made object. Because there were some trajectories as it fell towards the sun where the sun accelerated it. And it was some still very small fraction of the speed of light, but faster than anything had been sent before. But the Parker Solar Probe, what was its mission and did it accomplish it?

35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:And is it still going? You know, I'm answering the last question first. Yes, Parker Solar Probe is going strong. You know, the first seven years it launched in 2018, the first seven years were basically dedicated to doing the prime mission. And after that, NASA is going to decide it as operating mission. So what Parker Solar Probe has done now, after 24 orbits, It took it to its closest point called the perihelion. It's about something like close to 10 solar radii, 3.8 million miles. But I know things in solar radii. It's inside of 10 solar radii. And that was important because we wanted to have a little bit of idea of crossing over from the Alphen zone into the corona, where the particles actually become solar wind.

36:03So we've done 24 of those and reached the closest point. And now we just kind of finished, I think, 28th per helium in June.

36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, wait, wait. Lika, is that closest point within the corona or is it still kind of safe outside the corona? Because you said 8 radii that feels a little distant. Fancy you would ask that, Neil. That's such a binary question. seriously. Damn, just getting dissed on my own shelf. So, so I already told you, right, that the alfin surface, alfin zone is not a spherically symmetric zone. It's not at 5 solar radia, 10 solar radia. We made lots of assumptions. There's not a sign there saying entering the alfin zone. No. So we are actually close enough that we go in and out. And we are actually able to measure the pristine solar wind in the corona.

37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's very cool. That's the best of all world. That's how it was designed. If you're only in it, you're just getting the same measurement. Exactly. What good is that? That's really cool, actually. Very cool. Very cool. Very cool. Instead of going to the poles of the sun, that was the original idea of solar probe, said, hey, we are going to the sun. We are going to take and that would have taken very little data and said, no, we want data. And so we created this alternate concept in the ecliptic and we get Venus gravity de-assist momentum. So it's between Venus and the closest point to sun. And that point is 3.8 million miles.

37:54But let's stick to solar radii. Solar radii.

37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. Yeah, the sun's diameter is almost a million miles across. Right. Now, Lika said something just casually. Go ahead. But I got to stop on it and like give an explanation. All right. Okay. She said, what's the word you used? De-accelerate. Oh, no, no, no. Gravitational de-assist. De-assist. The de-assist. Not de-ist. Okay, I'm sorry. to de-assist. To de-assist. As opposed to. We are so accustomed to hearing about gravitational assist. Because you have a probe that doesn't have enough energy to get to its destination. You come in behind, you sneak up behind a planet. You fall towards the planet, you gain its orbital speed and you keep coming out the other side.

38:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:So you can do this, boost your speed, get to wherever you want in the solar system. Here's the problem, you wanna get to the sun. The sun is not in orbit. Right. We're in orbit and we launched it from here. We got to somehow eat that orbital speed. Right. We got to get rid of it somehow so that we can fall in towards the sun. Because we don't want to overshoot it. Correct. Correct. So if you come the other direction into a planet, you get a D assist. Ah. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. And Venus is sitting there conveniently between us and the sun. And so Venus is doing the breaking for us. Doing the breaking for us.

39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's really cool. So it seems like, I don't know if it's true or not, that there's been more auroral activity visible at latitudes farther south than usual. Right. And the aurora, we know, comes from the solar wind. Right. And the solar wind is stoked, we know, from the solar cycle. Okay. So, Lika, tell me about the solar cycle. I know it's a big question, but how often do we have you? Okay. the solar cycle and what it does to the solar wind and is the sun burping up more wind lately than historically or are we just better informed because we have space weather people saying look north go north this weekend Aurora check it out there you go is it just our awareness or is it really happening and what do what do sun burps smell like stop is it like pastrami that has to be the cosmic query question and I will answer.

40:14Not right now, because I have to think about it. But it's a great question, I think. What will it answer? So, solar cycle, I mean, I don't even, we talked about this in some of the previous shows, where to begin. But generally speaking, you know, solar, the convection zone that we talked about and the convection cells and all that and the churning of plasma and creating magnetic field with dynamo. All of this creates kind of condition for generating. It is moving plasma creates magnetic field. That's the key thing to remember. It's the same process of dynamo anywhere. But in the case of the sun, it has a beat.

41:00It has a couple of beats, actually.

41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, I just want to add something there. So it's not just moving plasma that creates magnetic field. It's any moving charge. Right. And a plasma is a charge cloud. Right. So you get the magnetic field for free because there are free charges moving in the plasma. In the plasma. Right. But turbines and things that generate electricity, they have charges moving within a magnetic field. Right. And it creates a current. But anyway, so it's a broader fact than just a plasma moving through. Well, no, we have one on Earth, but it's because we have an iron core. Oh, in our core. And it's liquid. But it's liquid.

41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. Otherwise, it would be dead. It's molten. The earth cools completely. We lose our magnetic field. And when we're done, right? We're toast at that point. We just have to go underground. Oh, and now we're chuds. Now we're chuds. Okay, please. Please continue, Alika. Actually, kind of this is something, you know, talking about a little bit more. Whenever you hear the term electromagnetic, we really can't separate electricity and magnetism. They are coupled. They are coupled physical process. One generates the other. One's movement generates the other. And that's what you're saying, Neil. And it depends what's moving and what's stationary.

42:18And depending on that, you either create an electric field or a magnetic field. Yeah, there you go. Oh, that's cool. I mean, that's a great way to think about it. That's very cool. Yeah, that they're part of the same thing always.

42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. All right, great. That's great. So you have this turbulence. So all this is happening. And so we get like a couple of signatures from all of this. And that is roughly 11-year solar cycle where the solar magnetic cycle peaks, where we get these sunspots, you know, big gigantic freckles on the sun. They are dark, but they are dark not because they are less intense or energetically less, but because the magnetic field is so strong, it inhibits kind of, you know, outward propagation of radiation. So you see it dimly in comparison to the rest of the surface. So magnetic, so solar max is a period when you have lots of sunspots.

43:17They basically start at high, mid-latitude, 50 degrees north and south. Then they gradually decline and then we get into solar minimum. And in solar minimum, there are times when you have no sunspot. That doesn't mean the sun is dead. There is still sort of a basal magnetic field always. And these are things we are understanding better. But another interesting thing that happens is, and that's why I say two beats, right? So there is the sort of the 11-year solar cycle, magnetic field increases, magnetic field decreases. But there is a flipping of the magnetic field also. So magnetism has two poles, north and south pole.

44:03Take a bar magnet and you will see those polarities if you put iron filings around them. So in the case of the sun, what happens? You know, what was, say, one polarity in one hemisphere, the northern hemisphere, changes completely in 11 years. But in 22 years, it goes back to its original polarity. And Neil, you have to explain this. That's why it's called a one magnetic solar cycle as opposed to one solar cycle. So the outboard effect of space weather kind of phenomenon doesn't care quite as much. We haven't at least seen its evidence. More data might lead us to understand it better. But they depend on really the intensity of the magnetic field and how many coronal mass ejections are happening, how many solar storms are happening.

45:01They happen in each cycle from maximum to minimum.

45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the space weather cares less about the polarity of the sun than it does about the intensity of the magnetic field at any given time. That's a fair statement, right? Well, I want to kind of be very clear about it because polarity does matter at Earth, but it is not the polarity on the sun. Okay. So what the solar polarity is doing is less consequential to space weather. Yeah, that's all I was trying to say. But the coronal mass ejections, when they come towards Earth and interact with our magnetic field, our magnetosphere, then the polarity that the particles are carrying is very important. You know, in one case, you would actually have a reconnection and particles would penetrate where our magnetosphere is no longer a bubble or a shield.

45:57In the other case, they are just going to get deflected. Just bounce off. So they repel.

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49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:So comment, please, on the greater frequency of reported aurora. Because I looked at how peaky the last solar maximum was. It was not oddly high. It was maybe a little low compared with an average over the last 50 years or so, or 100 years. So is this just better reporting? Because it was like 11 p.m., and I looked to my right. I was driving on Long Island. I looked to my right, and the sky was kind of glowing reddish. Okay. And I said, wait a minute. The sun set many hours ago. It can't be sunset colors. Wait a minute. I'm facing north. What the? So I pulled over, pulled out my phone, my camera phone, and took a photo, which is, the phone is more sensitive than your eyes are to different colors.

50:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:And there it was. Aurora? It was Aurora. And I'd never seen Aurora on Long Island before in New York. And so. Do you remember the time? Which month? I do remember the date. It was October 10th, 2024. And that year was Solar Max. Isn't that correct? Yep. Okay. Cool. So are you friends with the Aurora? Like, yeah, I know that one. Well, I have sun's number. I could tell you a couple of stories about the sun. And so this is, you're asking a very important question because it is a question in my mind. And someday when I am not working professionally, I want to go back to science and actually kind of try to understand this.

51:08And I share whatever I experience and my speculative thoughts on this. I'm not going to go there right now, but it is a confluence of two things. We are all very aware. So I would say heliophysics figure that I talked about in 2024 and overall, the outreach that NASA has done over the years has really seeped in to the community. consciousness. So people are paying more attention. We have better cameras. So we are capturing this, but still that doesn't answer everything.

51:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, however, I do end every show saying, keep looking up. You should, you should. No, no, I do. Every show ends that way. So maybe it's us. Right. Just seeing what we should be seeing because we actually did what we were supposed to do. We're looking up. So that's a little piece of it. We don't know how big a piece. A little piece of it. So the aurora happens when solar wind particles come and interact, you know, with our atmosphere dislodging, you know, oxygen atoms to, you know, their electrons to higher orbits. And we get different colors like green at 100, 200 kilometers, red with higher energy.

52:28These are all oxygen at higher elevation. And then you have blue and green for nitrogen. So we kind of know all this, what exactly is going on. But remember one thing, that auroras are most visible in the higher southern or northern latitudes around the magnetic axis, which is substantially different from the actual geographic north-south axis. So May 2024 was actually one of those auroras where basically it is the first G5. NOAA sort of describes storms in scales and G5 is the highest geomagnetic storm scale. And so that particular, the May 2024 Aurora was G5 level and it lit up all the way to Ladakh, India, to Florida.

53:31I mean, think about being south. It is incredibly south, right? So if you allow me, I kind of want to describe, there are a couple of personal stories related to Aurora that hadn't happened until this solar cycle. Oh, please.

53:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. One is May 2024. You know, that happened between May 10th and 12th, 2024. I was in D.C. I didn't get to see the Aurora. My friends took pictures, you know, as I would have seen it from our deck in Boulder and sent it to me. About a week earlier, a dear friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Jennifer Gannon, a space weather scientist from Boulder, passed away. And I was heartbroken. And I wrote a short piece on LinkedIn, essentially celebrating her life. And to me, it felt like that auroral display was nature celebrating her life. And I wrote a little haiku on that. Yeah. And this was actually picked up by White House.

54:46And we named our first solar storm as Gannon Storm. Oh, that's lovely. We meaning, you know, not anybody I know, but White House people, space weather people. This is incredible. You know, we have named hurricanes for 100 years.

55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right, right, right. But this is the first time that we named a storm. Well, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah, it really is. Well, thanks for sharing that. There's one more. Oh, another one. Okay. Well, because they are so personal, I cannot not say it. Please. So in November 2025, now, you know, this is kind of a sad story. You know, in my life, who has looked at the sun, chased eclipses, studied everything, I had never seen an aurora with my own eyes. I had not. In November, between 11th to 13th of November, and this event reached the G4 scale of NOAA. It's like the sun did a private show for me.

56:02I saw an aurora so bright from 6.30 p.m. to 3 a.m. in the morning. And our neighbors thought, you know, I had gone crazy. you know basically now i i myself have been in a position where i've seen colors from 6 30 p.m to 3 a.m i'm not sure i'm not gonna say it was aurora it was very beautiful the sun didn't speak to you in color but your mental state did which is

56:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, that works sometimes too. Pretty awesome. Why not? Why not? So the sun has these storms every now and then. Okay. But they have to be aimed towards Earth for that to affect us in the way we describe for Aurora. Right. Because if it's not aiming towards Earth, then it just misses Earth. Right. Then it goes to Mars or any other place or directly into heliosphere. Okay, I just want to be clear that not every storm observed on the sun results in an aurora on Earth. So with that in mind, I wanted to ask both of you. I can't remember the name of the movie, but I believe the opening scene is these catastrophic coronal mass ejections that are so massive that— Now, in the movie, they say these microwaves come to Earth and melt.

57:34Neil deGrasse Tyson:like half the damn half a city okay okay and they're like very random some things melt some things don't that wasn't 2012 is that 2012 well there's another one where they geologists go to the middle of the earth to find out that's that's the core the core that's the core that's yeah yeah i think you're talking about 2012 is that 2012 yeah they pulled that they pulled that that out of their ass real okay you know you know what i i i kind of because we know so little honestly Honestly. So it's not. Okay, one thing we can say, we haven't seen this from the sun. We don't expect to see it, probabilistically speaking.

58:12But it is not impossible for other stars. We now study exoplanet, right? And I think heliophysics informs the exoplanet science. So we have all these red dwarf stars with gigantic sunspots that we don't see on our sun. And they produce coronal mass ejections and storms that are of the gigantic proportion. And so what they could do, we don't know. I mean, that's why science is so beautiful. You know, we export our knowledge to any place in the universe. And sun and earth, they are our laboratories.

58:52Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, we even can bring past data into the present if it can give us insight into what we should fear. For example, spend a moment, because we're running a little bit short in time here, but there's stuff I want to make sure we hit. Was it 1859, this famous solar flare? Carrington event. The Carrington event, the famous solar flare that short-circuited the brand new telegraphs that they had along the railroad to communicate from one station to another. Have we had that event since then, but we were not as susceptible? Or would such an event today knock out all of our satellites, which are right now Elon alone has 12 ,000 satellites up there?

59:39It's actually a fascinating question because one of the things we don't get to measure during such a term, even during Carrington event, I think there was only one magnetometer in Mumbai, Kolaba, Mumbai, that measured the actual magnetic field. So something happens on the sun, but something that all those mass magnetic field particles have to interact with Earth. That is where space weather phenomenon is actually happening, right? Where the ionosphere gets more ionized, where electricity sort of funnels through the soil into grids and we get power outages, where energetic particles can spoil satellite sensors, where astronauts are worn for radiation, where high-altitude aviation is susceptible again for radiation.

1:00:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:What I want to know is, is it a G5, G10? What level storm will put our satellites at risk? Because we have a lot of assets right now in space. As a scientist in me, Neil, I think we limit ourselves when we put those restrictions. We don't know enough to say. Because there are many different phenomena interacting with many different environments. There's magnetic field. There's energetic particles. There is radiation. So sometimes even, and I can give you an example. Do you want me to give you an example? Please do. Okay. So I think in late January, early February 2022, Starling, you know, launched something like some 49 satellites, which it does very periodically.

1:01:32Everybody pays attention to space weather, what the sun is doing, and NOAA actually informs everyone. And so they were aware there was a very mild coronal mass ejection going on. So they were familiar and said, no, we can launch into that. They launched and, you know, about 38 to 39 of those satellites didn't reach launch orbit with this really medium class coronal mass ejection. So what happened? What happened is that the sun launched many coronal mass ejections that gradually started heating the thermosphere, ionosphere, and created a lot of drag. And the Starlink satellites didn't have enough propulsion, enough Delta V to launch them.

1:02:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Look at that. That's yet another way you can impact the health and safety of a satellite. Right. I forgot about that, Mika. Oh, my gosh. So do we know what level the Carrington event was from 1859? From every indication, it was absolutely G5. And I don't think we have the scales right. We get saturated. So we need to, you know, really think deeply. And I think NOAA and space weather community is thinking about it to really amplify the scales. Yeah, plus there are a lot of military satellites that are radiation hardened. Yeah, they better be. so there are ways you can sort of and there are others for for example you can we have some of our telescopes depending on whether we're going into a a meteor shower or some other phenomenon we can actually put the telescope in safe mode okay close it down turn it over right and then so there are ways to mitigate this that's why prediction is so important yes space weather that people just live in the space weather pages.

1:03:34People don't talk about space weather the way we talk about our weather. Hot enough for you? No, they don't do that. It's got real consequences. That is going to change, Chuck. Okay. Mark my word. Get me back in 10 years if I'm still here and not blended with the corona. And I'll prove myself right.

1:03:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:If you blended with the corona, it would become that much more colorful. Oh, look at that, Neil. Thank you. Way to go. That was good. That was good, man. That was pretty good. All right. What's coming down the pike in the future in missions to the sun? So the community, the world has launched, you know, lots of interesting missions. PUNCH, polarimeter to unify the corona and heliosphere. It's a constellation of four small satellites in polar sun synchronous low Earth orbit. And they image the solar wind. You know, that's a gap area in imaging, in understanding how solar storms are born on the surface of the sun and propagate through the corona into interplanetary medium and touch us here at Earth.

1:04:49And that is really going to connect in imaging from the surface of the sun all the way to Earth. And it's extraordinary science. You know, we can connect it to auroras in future. Then we have things like IMAP, right? Interstellar mapping and acceleration probe. And that is actually looking at the heliosphere, the original question. It operates from Lagrange Point 1 with instruments, and it kind of is still, it started taking its science data, I think, in February, and it is trying to sharpen sort of the discovery that one of the earlier missions called IBEX, Interstellar Boundary Explorer, found, which was discovery.

1:05:37You know, all of a sudden you look at the heliosphere from inside the heliosphere, inside the bubble, and you see this giant ring in high energy, energetic neutral atoms. So IMAP is going to shed light on that, but it also serves as a space weather buoy.

1:05:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:I see what you did there. You said it would shed light on it. Yeah, I see that. You catch that? And so what you implied there is these missions, they can't use visible light because not all of this is giving us imageable substance in visible light. You need other bands of the spectrum to image the high energy. Right. What bands of light? Ultraviolet x-rays, I guess? Well, the ultraviolet x-rays, white light, infrared, all of those. But outside of that, yeah. I mean, some of these you have to be outside of our atmosphere, otherwise they get absorbed. So that's why we have to launch. You know, before we launch sort of extreme ultraviolet and X-ray satellites, this is way back, right?

1:06:40We did not really know that the sun was a cauldron, as you described very early on, of this sort of seething plasma. You can't see that in white light.

1:06:55Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, Lika, is the United States a leader in the world in studying the sun? Or what other countries are players here in this space? Sun belongs to no one. And sun shines on every flag. There are very many interesting missions from all over the world. Europe plays a very big role. European Space Agency, Solar Orbiter, which is in partnership with NASA. And it takes us up to 30, 35 degrees above the ecliptic so we can view the poles of the sun. Never before done before. We have Proba 3 also in Europe that created two spacecraft to create artificial eclipse. Externally occulted coronagraph at extreme with two spacecraft.

1:07:45And they are finding out, again, sort of new sources of slow solar wind. The thing is, every time you look somewhere, you find something.

1:07:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:So this is eclipses on demand. Eclipses. I love that. Eclipses on demand. Yeah. India launched Aditya L1. Aditya is sun in Sanskrit, which is sparked at L1 looking at the surface of the sun, interior with magnetic field of the sun, with in situ instruments. So Aditya is Indians' eye on the sun. We have JAXA. JAXA, the Japanese space agency. And then there is China. China is doing amazing stuff. So CUAFU L1 mission that was conceived of about 20 years ago, it's launched. It's measuring all kinds of phenomenon, including X-rays. So what every agency is doing is looking at the gap areas that, you know, a while ago we had as a community created and trying to fill those gaps.

1:08:59Is this a cooperative effort? Is this information shared around the world with all the other scientists? So except for China, everything else is shared. Except for China. Right now. Right now.

1:09:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:And by the way, the Artemis Accords, which are a modern day attempt to create some level of cooperation in space. In particular, if you discover something that could impact the safety or security of my next mission, either my hardware or my wetware people, then you are obliged to share that. To share that. But China, last I checked, had not yet signed it. It hasn't signed it. But India has signed it. And the list of countries you'd expect have signed it. Right. And the list of countries you might expect wouldn't sign it, hasn't signed it yet. Of course. Russia. Yeah. Of course. Sunlight is spherically symmetric, shines everywhere.

1:09:56Everywhere. That's right. But how it touches us as human beings, our culture evolves. That's like that heliosphere, heliopause border, or the alphanic zone border. It's very crooked. There you go. Look at that. That was profound. That's a mic drop.

1:10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:That's a mic drop. We like it. Well, Lika, that's all the time we have. This has been a delight to catch up with you. And thanks for sharing those two stories, sad but beautiful, and about your friend and about yourself and what role Aurora played within it. We'll have to catch up with you again. Just, you know, if the sun burps or anything or misbehaves, you're going to be on our hotline, okay? Well, when you get those cosmic query questions, you know oh there it is absolutely on the sun heliosphere because everything is under that so there you go everything under the sun under the sun all right Chuck always good to have you man always a pleasure all right this has been StarTalk this was the heliophysics edition nice I like that until next time I bid you to keep looking up

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