MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIE TY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC
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Science isn’t in the books,
it’s in the stars and atoms
A lot of what scientists know about
stars comes from studying the sun.
In space terms, it’s right next door, a
mere eight minutes of light’s travel
time away. So astronomers have had an
easy opportunity to spy on their stellar
neighbor to learn everything about it,
including its inner chemistry.
Armed with this close-up intelligence on how the sun
works, astronomers can draw more reliable inferences than
would otherwise be possible about more distant stars — and
use that knowledge to help piece together the history of the
entire cosmos.
But after decades of solar studies, it seems that scientists
actually don’t know as much as they thought they did about
the sun’s ingredients. New research has been challenging
textbook estimates of how much oxygen, carbon and other
elements the sun possesses, as Alexandra Witze reports in
this issue (Page 18). Astronomers may now have to revise
some of their conclusions about several other astronomical
issues, such as how stars and galaxies throughout the universe form and evolve.
All that is fun enough. But the real message of this development is the reminder that science is not the sum of past
research as recorded in textbooks, but the active process of
continuing to question nature even if those books say the
answers are already in.
Take the size of the proton, for example. You could look
that up in a physics book, or you could shoot a laser beam
at a muon orbiting a proton and measure how much energy
it takes to boost the muon from one energy level to another.
This energy depends quite precisely on how big the proton
is. When scientists did this experiment, they found that the
calculated size didn’t match the textbook answer, as Rachel
Ehrenberg reports on Page 7.
Puzzled scientists will have to do even more experiments
now to find out whether the old or new measurements are
right. It may even turn out to be the case that one of the
most well-established theories in all of physics, quantum
electrodynamics, will need to be revamped to reconcile the
conflicting data.
So it is with many areas of scientific endeavor. No matter
how thorough scientific knowledge might seem to be, there’s
always something new inside the sun.
—Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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