@cosmos4u@scicomm.xyz2025-06-14 11:33:45
In the final talk of the morning sessions of the #SolarEclipse Conference Thoby Dittrich talked about the Modern Eddington Experiment (the website https://moderneddingtonexperiment.org is under heavy construction): the best observing result of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun in the optical during solar eclipses is still Brun's from 2017 - https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00343 - while others have tried with a vengeance since. The goal remains to observe the significant deflection of star positions between 1 and 2 solar radii from the center of the Sun: this is known as the 'forbidden zone' because the corona can be very bright here and only bright stars can be measured reliably - but those in turn are rare. It turns out that the star fields around the totally eclipsed Sun in 2027 and 2028 will be unusually rich in good candidates so there is (or should be) considerable interest in the physics didactics community to make use of these eclipses in southern Spain / northern Africa and Australia, respectively. 4/n
