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Experiments planned for the 2024 total solar eclipse aim to figure out how the sun works.
Clara Moskowitz: For Scientific American’s Cosmos, Quickly, I’m Clara Moskowitz. On April 8, we’re in for a treat. A total solar eclipse will be visible across a broad swath of North America, giving us a view of the edges of the sun as the moon passes in front of its face. 
Here to talk about the eclipse and what scientists hope to learn from it is science writer Rebecca Boyle, author of a feature story in our March issue about our amazing sun.

Hi, Becky. Thanks for being here.
Rebecca Boyle: Thanks for having me.
Moskowitz: So how big a deal is this eclipse for North America?
Boyle: It is a big deal. This is not something you get to see every day, even every few years, even every couple of decades. It’s pretty rare. And to have [one] across such a huge swath of the U.S. and big population centers is really going to be special.
Moskowitz: Have you ever seen a total solar eclipse in person before?
Boyle: I’ve only seen one. And I know that there are people who, after they see one, go and see as many as they possibly can. And I think that’s a goal I might have for myself later in life. There is nothing like it. It is hard to overstate how surreal and how beautiful and how otherworldly an eclipse is.

We had an annular eclipse in October of last year, which was really also pretty unique. It’s a strange thing to see the moon appear to take a bite out of the sun. But a total solar eclipse is just mind-blowingly strange and beautiful and mystical, and people are left crying and speechless. It’s really pretty special to witness—not only to see it yourself but to see the spectrum of reactions that other people have to watching this happen.
Moskowitz: I can’t wait to. So where are you going to be for this eclipse?
Boyle: Right now our plan is to be in Waco, Texas, which is on the path of totality and is, you know, a nice town and fairly small and maybe a little bit less hectic than a place like Dallas, which was also on our list of options.
It’s actually one of many cities that this eclipse is hitting pretty directly. It’s going over a lot of large population centers in the U.S. So I’m prepared for lots of traffic, which happened in 2017 as well.
I drove to Kentucky with my family [in 2017], and it took us like nine hours to get home and it should have taken about four. So this time we’ll see. But the plan is for us to drive from Colorado to Waco, Texas.
Moskowitz: Totally worth the traffic.
Boyle: I think so.
Moskowitz: So how important are eclipses for science? What can we learn from them?
Boyle: We can learn a surprising amount about not only the sun but the earth and life on Earth and how it responds. So during an eclipse—this is one of those things that will never cease to blow my mind—the moon and the sun appear to be the same size in our sky, even though they’re very different sizes, obviously.

But the sun is 400 times more distant and 400 times larger than the moon. So they line up almost exactly. And this is a thing that only happens right now, you know; in the distant past on Earth, we wouldn’t see the same phenomenon, and in the distant future on Earth, we wouldn’t see the same phenomenon of the lunar disk blocking the entire solar disk so that only you can see the sun’s corona, which is its outer atmosphere.
And it looks sort of like a crown, which is actually what the word means. It’s this ring of tendrils of light that you can only visualize during a total eclipse. You can see it, you know, using instruments from space all the time. And there are plenty of those taking observations of our sun all the time. But when you’re on Earth and the sun vanishes for this brief moment, you can see the sun’s atmosphere in a way that’s really interesting for scientists to understand how our star functions.
And at the same time, you know, a lot of animals and humans, as I was saying, respond to this in a very strange and interesting way. During the last eclipse in 2017, across North America, a lot of scientists and citizen scientists watched animals and, you know, nature, sort of—respond. And that will be happening again this time. It’s pretty interesting to see animals freaked out at the zoo.

Birds go back to their roosts. Insects start singing like it’s nighttime. It’s always very overwhelming to watch all of this.
Moskowitz: So what are some of the big scientific questions that researchers want to answer about the sun?
Boyle: So we actually don’t have a great handle—we’re developing a lot better information right now. Well, we don’t have a great handle on how the sun works, which I also find fun to think about. Like, we don’t know how our star actually functions because it’s this, you know, roiling ball of plasma. And it’s really difficult to figure out the physics [that] underlie how it functions and how it generates the solar wind, which comes from the corona, the atmosphere that we can see during an eclipse.
Scientists still want to know how the corona becomes so hot. It’s actually way hotter than it should be. According to the laws of thermodynamics, the surface of the sun is much cooler than the atmosphere, which seems illogical. Like, if you’re standing at a campfire and the flames itself are, you know, cooler than the air around the fire, that’s, that’s what the sun actually does.

And the mechanisms behind that are not super well understood. And neither is the generation of the solar wind. We’re getting a better picture of this due to some new orbiters that are studying the sun in great detail. But it’s an open question as to how these things are generated and what our star is doing in its insides that connects to its outsides.
Moskowitz: So you mentioned new orbiters. What are these missions and what are they doing? That’s so cool.
Boyle: We have two right now that are the primary new ones. There’s Parker Solar Probe, which is named for [the late] astrophysicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind and was correct about it, and then Solar Orbiter, which is a European Space Agency orbiter, and they’re both sort of taking this multispectral imaging of the sun—Parker Solar Probe in particular.
It was designed to fly into the corona and sample it. And so it has this incredible heat shield. It’s really a marvel of engineering that they were able to build something that can literally fly into the outer atmosphere of the sun and sort of dip its toes in the water, so to speak.

And we’re learning an incredible amount of detail now about how the corona functions, how the solar wind is generated, how the corona is heated, how solar flares happen and how they move through the solar wind, [and] how coronal mass ejections happen, which is different from a solar flare but sort of visually seems similar, where the sun unleashes these giant waves of material that come flying toward Earth and the other planets.
And Parker Solar Probe has been hit by a few of those directly, which is in some ways horrifying for the scientists who use this probe but is also really exciting because then they get this, like, direct sample of the sun flinging this fiery material at their spacecraft, and they can take all kinds of measurements.
And these are painting a really pretty new picture of how our star functions.
And it’s going to help us understand our own star better but also maybe other stars.
Moskowitz: Wow. So tell me more about other stars. How can studying the sun tell us about these stars, you know, many thousands of light-years away?

Boyle: We know that the sun is pretty common. I mean, it’s a pretty mediocre star, in some ways. There are a lot of stars like it. It’s fairly quiet, actually, for a star of its type, which maybe is lucky for us. But its, you know—the nearest astrophysical laboratory, its light only takes eight minutes to reach us. So it’s a great way to study the whole functions of a star in the middle of its lifecycle, which our sun is.
And there are many, many stars like it in our galaxy and beyond our galaxy. So if we can understand the very basic mechanisms of what makes our star tick, that will help us paint a picture of how other stars in the universe work and maybe how they connect to their own planets and the stars around them and the environments that they’re in and everything traveling through the universe together—how they all interact.
The sun is the next-door laboratory for beginning to answer those questions.
Moskowitz: So for people who didn’t already have this eclipse on their radar or don’t really notice the sun all that much in their daily life besides the light that it gives during daytime, why should we care about the sun and all these scientific mysteries going on inside it?

Boyle: I think it’s just fascinating to realize that we don’t actually know everything that there is to know about our own star. You know, we have [an] incredible grasp on how galaxies form and merge. We have, you know, some detailed understanding about supermassive black holes at the centers of these galaxies. We know a lot about exoplanet populations and where exoplanets are found around other stars.
We have learned an incredible amount of detail in the last ten years, especially using our eyes in the sky about other stars. And yet we have these pretty lingering mysteries about the star that we call home and that gave rise to everything that’s ever existed in the solar system. And I just think that’s a really fun problem.
Like, let’s look inward a little bit. Let’s look at our own home star and understand how it works and what makes it go. And what will that tell us about how other stars function but also maybe how we got here and, you know, how we are thinking about our own place in the universe?
Moskowitz: Well, thanks, Becky. That’s great. Thanks for being here.

Boyle: Thanks so much for having me.
Moskowitz: Cosmos, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio and Tulika Bose.

Some researchers say that the standard definition of sexual orientation is incomplete—and offer a tool for expanding it.
Stacy Watnick: The first thing that I do with clients is I tell them that we’re going to go slow—because there are three things that most clients … do not talk about in therapy, and those are religion, politics and sex.
[CLIP: Intro music]

Kate Klein: There’s this, like, whole world underneath people’s clothing that no one talks about.
Sari van Anders: Our science, in some ways…, is…catching up with people’s existences.
Meghan McDonough: I’m Meghan McDonough, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. This is part one of a four-part Fascination on the science of pleasure. In this series, we’re asking what we can learn from those with marginalized experiences to get to the bottom of BDSM, find the female orgasm and illuminate asexuality. In this episode, we’ll discuss new ways to question your sexuality, according to science that draws from feminism and queer theory.
But first, let’s get real basic.
Stacy Watnick: Tell me, when I say the word sex or sexuality to you, what comes up?

McDonough: That’s Stacy Watnick, a clinical psychologist based in San Diego, California. She specializes in relationship issues and sexuality. She’s noticed certain patterns in her clients when she asks this question.
Watnick: First, surprise—that there’s such a range of experiences in their body and in their mind about it…. Frequently, I get some shame and discomfort. They’re not sure what words they’re supposed to use: “Are those bad words?”
A little lean forward…. they’re sort of excited and there’s some tension in wanting to tell me—or a little lean back because they’re not sure it’s safe.
McDonough: Stacy asks her clients if they’ve heard of gender and orientation. They talk about the words they know. And then she brings up the zine.
Zine is short for “magazine.” But zines are different from traditional magazines. They tend to be self-published and not typically what you’d find in an academic setting.
This particular zine invites readers on a “journey through the landscape of your sexuality.” The front cover features a drawing of five people on a path leading into the horizon. Each is holding a map labeled “SCT.” SCT stands for sexual configurations theory, a term coined by Sari van Anders, a gender, sex and sexuality researcher at Queen’s University in Ontario.
Sari van Anders: I was doing some work about multipartnering and things like polyamory…, I was at a conference where there was … a session about asexuality…. And I started thinking about the way these two … identities claimed by different people might come together.

McDonough: Here’s Sari, the creator of this theory. She and her team created the zine as a more accessible offshoot of her 2015 academic paper on the topic.
Van Anders: It was the most exciting piece of work I’ve ever done. I’ve never really done work where it just felt like it had to come out, and it was sort of bubbling out of me.
I think we can maximize our pleasure when we understand what it is that we’re wanting, what the options are, who we are. We can think through some things that we might never have had prompts to do before.
McDonough: Oxford Languages defines sexual orientation as “a person’s identity in relation to the gender or genders to which they are typically attracted.” Sexual configurations theory asks: What if this sort of definition is incomplete?

Sari’s theory basically complicates the idea that sexual orientation is only based on gender. She built it on the existing academic literature and on what people shared about their sexualities.
Van Anders: And it was really important to me to include not just diverse sexualities and genders and people with diverse sexualities and genders but people with marginalized experiences, and so on …
McDonough: Such as people who are LGBTQ+, disabled, into kink or BDSM, asexual or non-monogamous.
Van Anders: Our science, in some ways, is, if anything, sort of, like, catching up with people’s existences…. I think many women know that, like, not all women who are attracted to men, maybe including themselves, that means they’re attracted to, like, penises or that’s the thing only that turns them on. And, and so there’s sort of an assumption that gender/sex sexuality, or what people typically call sexual orientation, is about, like, genital match-ups, like, “I have these genitals, and I’m attracted to people who have those genitals.” But really, like, we rarely see people’s genitals until we’ve already decided we’re attracted to them, right…. Usually there’s so much else going on.

McDonough: Sari uses the term “gender/sex” to mean features that are both socialized and biological and considers it to be just one aspect of sexual orientation. 
Van Anders: You know, it’s not always bodies; there’s also ways of being in the world or clothes, appearance, presentation, the way people talk, how someone treats you. And research on attraction is pretty clear that a lot of other things are rated pretty high up, like kindness or sense of humor or things like that.
McDonough: Sari refers to this as “sexual parameter n”—all the other things that make us attracted to a person.
The way she visualizes these aspects is through cone-shaped diagrams where people can pinpoint their preferences.
Aki Gormezano: As an example, you could think about the tornado for gender/sex sexuality…. So there’s a space on top where there’s a ring going around the outside that SCT calls the binary ring.

McDonough: This is Aki Gormezano, a sexuality researcher who did his Ph.D. with Sari at Queen’s. The ring he’s describing represents what most people know as the sexuality spectrum.
Gormezano: And then there’s a whole space beyond that, falling inside of the binary ring, completing that circle, where you’re not just thinking about women and men, you’re thinking about gender/sex-diverse folks who are occupying spaces outside of that binary ring.
McDonough: This is called the “challenge area.”
Gormezano: That circle I described is on the top, but then it moves all the way down to a point forming what kind of looks like a cone. And there’s a little meter ranging from zero to 100 on the far left of that, and that’s to indicate the strength of your attractions.
McDonough: In lay terms, if gender/sex was an important part of your attraction to people, you’d mark a place higher up on the tornado. If it wasn’t, you’d mark a place farther down. There are also tornadoes for partner number—one, multiple or none—as well as for sexual parametern, representing the other factors Sari mentioned, such as kindness and sense of humor.

Gormezano: Growing up, I was, like, pretty uncritical of my sexuality for the most part… Like I identified as straight by default. And a lot of my attractions, you know, as a cis boy at the time, or, like, now a cis man, were to cis women.
McDonough: In case you don’t know, “cis” here refers to cisgender, when a person’s gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.
Gormezano: I had a point in high school where I realized … I did have attractions to people who were not cis girls or cis women…. I think I was just, like, confused and upset and didn’t really feel like it was something I could talk about. You know, especially as someone who played sports and was known as an athlete, where that was a big piece of my identity—like, I played soccer all the way through and still do…. I think, for me, the hardest part about realizing that I had interests and attractions that didn’t fit with being straight was that it challenged a lot of my identity around being a man or, like, wanting to be.

McDonough: Aki says that studying sexuality as an adult has helped him see that this isn’t a problem and that sexual orientation, identity and status don’t necessarily line up perfectly. Sexual configurations theory calls this “branched.”
Van Anders: Orientations have to do with, like, attractions, interests, arousals, desire [and] pleasure, and those might be different, or they might be the same. Like, you might really enjoy the thoughts or have fantasies about being with a man. And then when it comes to the actual sex you do, you find people of any gender are really enjoyable…. And status refers to, like, what you’re kind of actually doing, have done or will do…, who you’re actually with, for example.
McDonough: In a 27-country survey conducted by the market research company Ipsos in 2021, for example, 80 percent of self-identified heterosexual people reported that they were only attracted to the opposite sex, and 12 percent of them said they mostly were. Meanwhile 60 percent of self-identified lesbian and gay people said they were only attracted to the same sex, and 24 percent of them said they mostly were. These “branches” of sexuality can all be mapped on separate “tornado” diagrams. If you’re still struggling to picture them, you’re not alone. Between gender/sex, partner number, and other factors—plus identity, orientation and status—it’s a lot. But portraying sexuality as complex is also kind of the point.

McDonough (tape): To what extent do you think sexuality labels are limiting or expanding? If you could imagine your ideal world of how people conceive of sexuality, would everyone have a label?
Gormezano: I think when you just have identities and you just have labels, especially when identities and labels are really narrow…, you might not have the language to articulate the ways in which you don’t perfectly fit with that identity or label…. And I think the more people … who are able to understand the ways in which they might branch from their label or, like, perfectly coincide with it, the more open everyone will be around, you know, just like understanding that, like, around each identity is, like, a collection of people who might vary from that in different kinds of ways.
McDonough: Stacy, the therapist we heard from earlier, commonly meets clients who are working through their sexualities.

McDonough (tape): How do you help them kind of figure that out?
Watnick: We kind of try labels on like clothes…. I’m gonna try this sort of sweater on and see: Does that feel snuggly? Do I feel comfortable? Is there, like, a resonance in my body and in my mind and my heart and my genitals, all over me, that this feels true…? And much like the sweater I put on, I don’t have to wear it all the time…. There’s a very flexible return policy on this kind of content: if they decide they don’t want it; they don’t have to keep it. But we’re trying it on. Let’s see how it feels.
McDonough: Stacy first saw Sari speak at a virtual conference during the pandemic. 
Watnick: And my whole brain lit up.

McDonough: The two of them have since formed a working group to bring sexual configurations theory into more clinical settings.
Van Anders: Those of us with marginalized or minoritized or oppressed genders, sexes or sexualities are often not given the tools from science or scholarship to make sense of ourselves. And so this can be helpful in that way. But also people who are majorities…, our culture tells everyone…, you’re just a cisgender man; that’s that; there’s nothing more complex; the complexity is for, you know, the other “complicated,” quote, unquote, people. But our research finds that the majorities actually have a lot of complexity and often have had even less prompt to think about it.
McDonough (tape): I’m wondering if you’ve had any pushback from the scientific community or otherwise?

Van Anders: We get a fair bit of skepticism from academics that what people might call laypeople, just you, people on the street, could actually do SCT diagrams because they are a bit more complex than “What is your attraction…?”…. So we sometimes get people who say, “This is pretty hard” or “I’m kind of confused.” And then we’re like, “Okay, can you describe yourself?” And then we look at the dot, and it matches. So people are actually able to do it anyway.
Van Anders: And we sometimes get pushback, too, from majorities who get, like, a little bit angry, who are like, “Okay, well, here, I can locate myself, but, like, I don’t believe in all these other locations….” You know, they’re usually seeing questions that have heterosexual first if there’s a checklist. And here it’s, like, you know, if you’re interested in women, that’s just one little dot in this whole diagram, and that can be a bit disorienting for people who are used to being with the center.
McDonough: Sari thinks that accounting for this complexity is not only helpful for individuals but also for future scientific research.
Van Anders: People sometimes forget that every measure we use is sort of telling a story about what the world is…. They’re kind of almost like a sieve that you sieve the world through. And depending on what that sieve looks like—whether it’s SCT, whether it’s a one-word question with a checkbox or answer or something—is going to let kind of different kinds of things through…. What is empirical in science is to try to measure the world as it is.

For Science, Quickly, this is Meghan McDonough. Tune in next time to listen to episode two of a four-part series on the science of pleasure.
Science, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose and Jeffery DelViscio. This episode was reported and edited by me, Meghan McDonough, with music by Dominic Smith