Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 16, 2026

Surface Mapping of Earth-like Exoplanets using Single Point Light Curves
Published on: May 10, 2020
Coronal streamers revealed during solar eclipses: Seeing is not believing, and pictures can lie
1Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, MS 238-725, Pasadena, CA 91109;
Abstract:
For those fortunate enough to have personally witnessed and photographed the visible corona surrounding the Sun during a solar eclipse, pictures are usually a let down for not living up to the visual view. After 150 years of investigating the corona, we understand it more fully and now know this difference to be real. The difference stems from our inability to either see or image the true distribution of simultaneous brightness because of its large dynamic range (eg, Rodriguez, Woods, 2008 Digital Image Processing, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall). Brightness in the corona is unprecedented, as it falls by three orders of magnitude over a distance of only one solar radius from the Sun.
Related Concept Videos
Photoelectric Effect
Cause and Effect
The de Broglie Wavelength
Space-Time Curvature and the General Theory of Relativity
This has been verified in many experiments. However, space and time are no longer absolute. Two observers moving relative to one another do not agree on the length of objects or the passage of time. The mechanics of objects based on Newton's laws of motion,...
Streamlines, Streaklines, and Pathlines
Detection of Black Holes
Their closest cousins are neutron stars, which are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed against each other, making them extremely dense. A neutron star has the same mass as the Sun but its diameter is only a few kilometers. Therefore, the escape velocity from their surface is close to the speed of light.
Not until the 1960s, when the first neutron...

