A total solar eclipse is set to darken skies across central and Eastern Canada in a rare celestial event last witnessed in the country 45 years ago.
On April 8, the eclipse’s path will cross through Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Several cities and towns will go into complete darkness during the day for a few minutes.
A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and the Earth, aligning perfectly and completely blocking the sunlight.
Typically, a total solar eclipse is visible once roughly every 18 months or once every one to two years from somewhere on Earth, but for a given location this can be a very rare occurrence coming after a gap of centuries.
“It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that you know you might not be able to get to experience again,” said Ilana MacDonald, outreach co-ordinator for the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.
4:42 Kingston will be one of the best places to view the Total Solar Eclipse on April 8 2024
The last time the path of a total solar eclipse crossed Canada was in 1979.
For Kingston, Ont., it’s the first one in nearly 700 years, said Robert Knobel, associate professor and head of the department of physics, engineering physics and astronomy at Queen’s University in the city.
“It’s a beautiful, natural phenomenon and it allows us to actually think about our place in the universe,” he said in an interview with Global News.
“It really allows us a chance to experience astronomical phenomena, just by walking outside.”
Who can view it?
Millions of people in parts of central and eastern Canada will get to witness this celestial event.
The eclipse will be entering over Mexico’s Pacific coast, dashing up through Texas and Oklahoma, and crisscrossing the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and New England, before exiting over Eastern Canada into the Atlantic.
The total solar eclipse will have a narrow path roughly 185 kilometres wide.
This image from the NASA Eclipse Explorer website shows the path of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse over North America. An estimated 44 million people live inside the 110-mile-wide (180-kilometre-wide) path of totality stretching from Mazatlán, Mexico to Newfoundland.
NASA via AP
The path of totality is a line that goes diagonally from the southwest to the northeast in North America, Knobel said.
In Ontario, places like Fort Erie and Niagara Falls will be “really good” spots to view the eclipse since the central path of totality is going through Lake Ontario, he said.
However, both Ottawa and Toronto, like many other cities, will only get a partial solar eclipse, in which the sun is not hidden in totality.
In Quebec, Montreal, Sherbrooke, and the Saint Lawrence Valley will also get a good view.
The eclipse will occur between mid and late afternoon, depending on location, in Canada.
Photo courtesy: Canadian Space Agency
What will it look like?
As the moon starts to obscure the sun, it will initially start out as a partial eclipse, when the sky gets darker and it becomes cooler.
“What you’ll see is a little bit of a crescent as the moon shadow passes in front of the sun,” Knobel said.
But the moment it goes from a partial eclipse to totality, you will notice a “dramatic change in temperature and light,” MacDonald said.
“As the moon completely covers the sun, you’ll have this big halo of light around the sun and that’s the sun’s corona, which you can’t usually see when the sun is just in the sky, because the sun itself is too bright,” she explained.
The moon covers the sun during a total eclipse Monday, Aug. 21, 2017, near Redmond, Ore.
Dan Falk, a science journalist in Toronto, has travelled across the world and witnessed five total solar eclipses, the most recent one in Oregon in 2017.
He said at the time of totality people will get to see a little black disk surrounded by halo and it will appear as if there is a little hole in the sky.
“It’ll be this very eerie, kind of surreal phenomenon that’s really not like anything else you can see,” he said.
“I’m hoping that lots of people, especially folks who haven’t had the chance to see this phenomenon before, are able to experience this.”
The total solar eclipse can last between one and four minutes, MacDonald said.
During this time, birds will start to react as if it’s nighttime and could start to fall asleep. Meanwhile, flowers will start to close just for those few minutes.
When totality is over, it’ll get bright again.
The peak spectacle on April 8 will last up to four minutes and 28 seconds in the path of total darkness.
How can you safely view it?
In preparation for the event, some school boards in Ontario and Quebec have already cancelled classes on April 8 out of an abundance of caution.
According to the Canadian Space Agency, looking directly at the sun without appropriate protection can lead to serious problems such as partial or complete loss of eyesight.
Experts stress that the danger of looking directly at the sun is not any different when there is a total solar eclipse as it would be on any other day of the year. It’s just that one is more tempted to look up when there is a total solar eclipse.
“It’s always dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper protection because the sun is very bright,” MacDonald said.
3:20 Tips on watching solar eclipses
The best way to protect yourself is by wearing eclipse glasses, made up of aluminized polyester, when you do look up during a partial eclipse.
People can also use cardboard and poke a hole through it or even a colander and cheese grater would work.
In the moments of totality, when the sun is completely covered, it is actually safe to take your glasses off for a few minutes safely and look up, Knobel and Falk said.
After this year, the next time a solar eclipse will be visible from Canadian soil will be in 2039, when the path of totality cuts the very northern part of Yukon.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
The European Space Agency is fast-tracking a new mission called Ramses, which will fly to near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it comes very close to our planet — closer even than the region where geosynchronous satellites sit.
Ramses is short for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as its name suggests, is the next phase in humanity’s efforts to learn more about near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and how we might deflect them should one ever be discovered on a collision course with planet Earth.
In order to launch in time to rendezvous with Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanctioning and appropriation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November of 2025. To arrive at Apophis in February 2029, launch would have to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is a big deal because large asteroids don’t come this close to Earth very often. It is thus scientifically precious that, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within 19,794 miles (31,860 kilometers) of Earth. For comparison, geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s surface. Such close fly-bys by asteroids hundreds of meters across (Apophis is about 1,230 feet, or 375 meters, across) only occur on average once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. Miss this one, and we’ve got a long time to wait for the next.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid known, being classified as having the potential to impact with Earth possibly in 2029, 2036, or 2068. Should an asteroid of its size strike Earth, it could gouge out a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, flash heating and earth tremors. If it crashed down in the ocean, it could send a towering tsunami to devastate coastlines in multiple countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit became more refined, however, the risk of impact greatly went down. Radar observations of the asteroid in March of 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from hundreds of kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally removing any lingering worries about an impact — at least for the next 100 years. (Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot with any accuracy, but there’s currently no suggestion that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So, Earth is expected to be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis comes through. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis responds by coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
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“There is still so much we have yet to learn about asteroids but, until now, we have had to travel deep into the solar system to study them and perform experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” said Patrick Michel, who is the Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, in a statement. “Nature is bringing one to us and conducting the experiment itself. All we need to do is watch as Apophis is stretched and squeezed by strong tidal forces that may trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material from beneath the surface.”
The Goldstone radar’s imagery of asteroid 99942 Apophis as it made its closest approach to Earth, in March 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/NSF/AUI/GBO)
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, and sticking with it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in prime position to conduct before-and-after surveys to see how Apophis reacts to Earth. By looking for disturbances Earth’s gravitational tidal forces trigger on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity and composition, all of which are characteristics that we would need to first understand before considering how best to deflect a similar asteroid were one ever found to be on a collision course with our world.
Besides assisting in protecting Earth, learning about Apophis will give scientists further insights into how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system, and, in the process, how planets (including Earth) formed out of the same material.
One way we already know Earth will affect Apophis is by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is categorized as an Aten-type asteroid, which is what we call the class of near-Earth objects that have a shorter orbit around the sun than Earth does. Apophis currently gets as far as 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million km, or 85.5 million miles) from the sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational nudge that will enlarge its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million km, or 102 million miles), such that its orbital period becomes longer than Earth’s.
It will then be classed as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses won’t be alone in tracking Apophis. NASA has repurposed their OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu, in 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), won’t arrive at the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after the close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will initially perform a flyby of Apophis at a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the object, then return in June that year to settle into orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
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Furthermore, the European Space Agency still plans on launching its Hera spacecraft in October 2024 to follow-up on the DART mission to the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART impacted the latter in a test of kinetic impactor capabilities for potentially changing a hazardous asteroid’s orbit around our planet. Hera will survey the binary asteroid system and observe the crater made by DART’s sacrifice to gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition post-impact, so that we can place the results in context.
The more near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis that we study, the greater that context becomes. Perhaps, one day, the understanding that we have gained from these missions will indeed save our planet.
