By Ed Downs

2017 American Eclipse (Ed Downs)Okay, this writer must admit to being a science nerd. Add the disciplines of astronomy and astrophysics to the word “science,” and this writer will go on a genuine “nerd binge.” The much-touted “American Eclipse” on Aug. 21 gave our entire country a chance to unabashedly “nerd out” with family fun and a national interest in science that lent great relief from the hodgepodge of today’s dearth of unwelcome news, insulting politicians, and threats of nuclear annihilation. 

You see, our Sun, a very average mid-size star, located between the Perseus and Sagittarius arms of a very average galaxy called the Milky Way, in a local neighborhood called the Orion Spur, is kind of important to us. Given the Milky Way’s total diameter of about 100,000 light-years, our Sun is about 26,000 light-years from the center of our galaxy, which contains a great black hole that is trying to eat us. For you aviators who have become totally dependent upon the GPS, try loading that location into your database! As big as all that sounds, there are billions of galaxies in our universe, each have billions of stars supporting trillions of planets. Yep, I like remembering these stats whenever I meet someone who thinks they are the singular most important life form in existence. 

As puny as it might be, our Sun is still the power source of life in our tiny solar system.  The Sun is especially important to the third orbiting rock, where a struggling life form, homo sapiens-sapiens (yep, you must say it twice), is utterly depended upon the Sun’s significant energy for survival. It is not by accident that the ancient Egyptian civilization chose Ra, the Sun god, as their choice for worship when they chose a temporary path of monotheism. Our Sun’s energy is, in fact, so great that without the Earth’s powerful magnetic fields (forming a Star Trek like “shields up”), our atmosphere would have been boiled away millions of years ago, and we would look a lot more like Mars than Earth.