It’s been a year since the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, captured millions of imaginations as the moon briefly blotted out the sun and cast a shadow that crisscrossed the United States from Oregon to South Carolina.
“It was an epic event by all measures,” NASA astrophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans in December. One survey reports that 88 percent of adults in the United States — some 216 million people — viewed the eclipse either directly or electronically.
Among those were scientists and citizen scientists who turned their telescopes skyward to tackle some big scientific mysteries, solar and otherwise. Last year, Science News dove deep into the questions scientists hoped to answer using the eclipse. One year out, what have we learned?