On 12 August, a total solar eclipse will sweep across parts of Europe and the Atlantic ocean as the moon passes between Earth and the sun, blocking out sunlight. Parts of the US and Africa, along with the entire UK and much of Europe and Canada, will see a partial solar eclipse.

Where can I see the eclipse?

Totality, which occurs when the moon lines up perfectly with the disc of the sun and blocks it out entirely, will begin in Russia around midday before sweeping eastward across the Arctic ocean. It will pass just south of the North Pole and make landfall in northeastern Greenland just after 4.00pm local time.

The shadow will then rush along the eastern coast of Greenland at a speed of more than 3400 kilometres per hour. The maximum length of totality will be about 2 minutes and 18 seconds, as the moon’s shadow crosses from Greenland into the Atlantic ocean. It will cross to Iceland, at which point the eclipse will become visible from more heavily inhabited areas – everywhere it will have passed so far is home only to small villages, research stations and those specifically making the journey to see the eclipse. In Reykjavík, though, totality will be visible for just over one minute at 5.48pm local time. This is the first time a total eclipse has been visible in Iceland since 1954, and the last time one will be visible there until 2196.

After skimming the western coast of Iceland, the total eclipse will make another ocean crossing and reach land again in northern Spain just before 8.30pm local time, grazing the northeast corner of Portugal and crossing the Balearic Islands off Spain’s east coast before the sun sets and the eclipse is over.

What happens during a total solar eclipse?

During totality, when the disc of the sun is completely concealed by the moon, temperatures on the ground rapidly drop by several degrees and daytime transforms into twilight. The stars and the outer reaches of the sun become visible. Usually, the sun’s outermost layer, the corona, is completely lost in the glare from its far brighter inner regions, but when those are blocked out, its shimmering sheets of extraordinarily hot plasma become briefly visible to the naked eye. In all other phases of the eclipse, it is crucial to wear eclipse glasses or use a solar filter while looking directly at the sun to prevent eye damage, but during totality it is safe to look at the corona.

That is precisely what many solar scientists will be doing during August’s eclipse. Total eclipses mark a valuable opportunity to observe the corona and try to unravel its many mysteries, including why it is so much hotter than the sun’s surface.

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While the total eclipse will be short and only visible in a few areas, a partial eclipse, with the moon taking a “bite” out of the sun, will last much longer across about a quarter of the entire planet. In many locations across the northern US, all of Canada, much of Europe and northwestern Africa, the partial eclipse will last more than an hour. It won’t be as dramatic as a total eclipse – the corona will not become visible, and the ambient light levels and temperatures won’t drop as dramatically – but will be watchable for many more people. During a partial eclipse, eye protection is needed the whole time. If you don’t have eye protection, there are several ways to watch the eclipse without looking directly at the sun, including using a pinhole camera or even natural shadows to create a projection of the sun’s shape as the moon passes in front of it.

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A small icy body as far away as Pluto has stunned scientists with the revelation that it has an atmosphere.

The object, located in the Kuiper Belt of distant frozen bodies at the edge of the solar system, is formally named (612533) 2002 XV₉₃, after the date of its discovery nearly a quarter of a century ago. It has a diameter of less than 500 kilometres.

The object also belongs to a class of objects known as plutinos because they are in the same stable orbit as Pluto, completing two revolutions around the sun for every three made by Neptune.

On 10 January 2024, 2002 XV₉₃ passed in front of a distant star, causing what is called an occultation. at Kyoto University and his colleagues observed this event from three locations in Japan.

If the body had no atmosphere, the star’s light would have disappeared and reappeared almost instantaneously when it went behind 2002 XV₉₃.

But instead, the team saw the star gradually fade and recover over about 1.5 seconds near the edge of the shadow.

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“These gradual changes are best explained if the star’s light was bent by a very thin atmosphere around 2002 XV₉₃,” says Arimatsu.

The team estimates a surface pressure of about 100 to 200 nanobars, roughly 5 million to 10 million times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere and about 50 to 100 times thinner than Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere.

“You could not breathe it, feel wind from it, or see anything like Earth’s sky,” says Arimatsu. “But it is not negligible scientifically because even such a thin atmosphere can measurably bend starlight, and it tells us that volatile gases are present or being supplied around a very small icy body.”

The team couldn’t determine the composition of the atmosphere directly from the data. Arimatsu suggests methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide are the most plausible candidates because they are among the few substances volatile enough to become gases at the very low temperatures of the outer solar system.

Another mystery is what has caused the atmosphere to form, with possibilities including volcanic activity, outgassing from the interior of 2002 XV₉₃ or even a cosmic collision.

“This discovery challenges our conventional view of small worlds in the outer solar system,” says Arimatsu. “Until now, clearly detectable atmospheres in the solar system were essentially associated with planets, dwarf planets and some large satellites. 2002 XV₉₃ appears to be one of the smallest solar system bodies yet with a clearly detected atmosphere.”

“There is an atmosphere, and we don’t understand why,” says at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

“If you’re standing on the surface of this object, you’re not going to see a sky like [what] we have. But it certainly challenges the assumption that even a thin, transient atmosphere can’t exist on a body this small.”

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Titan’s plains may be covered in up to a metre of fluffy, organic “snow”. About 65 per cent of the surface of Saturn’s huge moon is made up of strangely uniform and flat plains, and they seem to be coated in a porous, dry layer of particles that have fallen from the sky.

The surface of Titan is difficult to study from afar because it is obscured by a thick, hazy atmosphere. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, managed to take a closer look using radar. Now, at Cornell University in New York state and his colleagues have analysed the radar data in more detail than ever before.

The way the radio waves from Cassini’s radar instrument bounced off Titan’s surface indicate that the surface isn’t as simple as those of most other rocky bodies in the solar system. “The canonical models that we use to try to understand Titan’s surface, which were developed for the moon and are used for the moon, Earth, Venus – they don’t work directly on Titan,” says Hayes. “Titan is a different beast in terms of the radar-scattering properties of the surface.”

Instead of a simple rocky surface, the radar data was a better fit to a two-layer model, with a blanket of soft, low-density material covering a harder terrain. The blanket layer, ranging from centimetres to a metre in thickness, is probably made up of organic molecules from Titan’s hazy atmosphere, which researchers expect should float down to the surface like snow before getting compacted and solidified over time.

Titan’s surface also experiences rain, wind and erosion, so it is important to understand how the blanket layer has built up slowly over time, shaped by these processes. “But this could give us a hint for how things work more broadly on Titan,” says Hayes.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which is expected to launch in 2028 and arrive on Titan in 2034, should be able to measure these layers and help us figure out exactly how they formed. It is crucial not only for our understanding of Titan itself, but also for the design of any future spacecraft that will follow Dragonfly to visit this strange moon and attempt landing there.

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