Opinion

I’m a planetary physicist. An eclipse is wondrous — don’t underestimate it.

Sabine Stanley, a Bloomberg distinguished professor in Earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of “What’s Hidden Inside Planets?”

I’ve always been amazed that total solar eclipses are possible. The sun, an 870,000-mile-wide ball of gas over 90 million miles away from us gets completely blocked by the moon, a 2,100-mile-wide ball of rock 240,000 miles away. If the sun were a bit bigger or closer, or if the moon were a bit smaller or farther, totality would not occur. There’s no scientific reason for this; it’s a wondrous coincidence.