A Feb. 17 annular solar eclipse darkened the surface of Antarctica
By EMILIA ROSE— science@theaggie.org
On Feb. 17, 2026, a glowing ring of fire passed over Antarctica, casting the frozen continent into a slight darkness. On that day, penguins and scientists alike witnessed the moon passing in front of the sun, which created a bright ring of light around the circumference of our lunar neighbor — an annular eclipse. A total solar eclipse, in contrast, is when the moon completely blocks the sun.
With regards to a total solar eclipse, how can the moon completely block our sight of the sun, despite the vast differences in the size of these astronomical bodies? The answer lies in the fact that apparent size — the size that an object appears to be — negatively scales with distance, meaning that the farther away an object is, the smaller it seems to us.
Andrew Wetzel, an astrophysicist at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, explained the relationship between the apparent sizes of these celestial objects.
“It’s a bit of a cosmic coincidence that even though the moon is much, much smaller than the sun, at their relative distances, the apparent size of the moon is just the same as the apparent size of the sun in the sky,” Wetzel said.
The sun may be 400 times wider than the moon, but it’s also 400 times farther away. As for the moon, even though it may appear to be the same distance away from Earth every night, it is, in fact, getting farther and farther away.
The moon revolves around the Earth due to the gravity between them, like an invisible rope tying them together. You may have heard that this same gravitational force is what causes the ocean’s tides to move up and down. However, Earth rotates faster than the moon orbits Earth. This consequently causes the tides to bulge ahead of the moon by a small margin. These tides tug on the moon, pushing it outwards into a further orbit. At the current rate, the moon is leaving us at around three centimeters per year.
What does this mean for total solar eclipses? Dawn Y. Sumner, a geobiologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, offered an answer.
“As it gets farther away, [the moon] will appear smaller in the sky, and it makes it less likely, over long periods of time, to have full eclipses,” Sumner said. “I think it’s of the order of a few hundred million years; [only then] it’ll be very noticeable that the moon no longer blocks out the sun.”
To be born at a time when our moon can compete with the light of our sun is truly a scientific coincidence; something that current generations are lucky to experience before it becomes completely impossible.
A common saying is that we were born “too late to explore Earth and too early to explore the stars.” Yet, we currently have total solar eclipses — an astronomical phenomenon that is so perfect, it will certainly be missed. This cosmic coincidence reminds us how meaningful it is to experience the rare combination of sun and moon.
Written by: Emilia Rose— science@theaggie.org
