By Pierre Léna & Serge Koutchmy
Springer, September 2025.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-92199-5
On June 30, a total solar eclipse over West Africa was studied by many astronomers, as it was the longest one of the century – slightly over seven minutes of totality. Yet, the supersonic aircraft Concorde 001, prototype of the future commercial jetliner made by France and United Kingdom, carried a crew and a team of scientists who could precisely meet the Moon’s shadow at a speed of Mach 2.2 and observe the full totality, with various instruments, for 74 minutes, an unbeaten record even after 50 years. The book Eclipsed Suns, the Solar Corona and Exoplanets. From Concorde 001 to Telescopes in Space, published in September in 2025 by Springer, tells the first-hand story of this extraordinary expedition in the stratosphere and the results of the five onboard experiments – both authors initiated and participated to this scientific adventure. In its second part, the book explores, in accessible terms for a general public, the knowledge of the solar corona fifty years after these observations, addressing still open questions, such as the heating of the gaseous K corona or the replenishment of the dusty F corona by comets vaporizing when getting close to the Sun. Space observatories, such as the European–NASA SOHO mission, are providing a renewed vision of the solar extended atmosphere and its relation with the Earth. Observations at X-rays and extreme-ultraviolet wavelengths provide a wealth of information on the corona, without the need of a total eclipse. Coronography is an elaborate instrumental technique, developed over the XXth century, to observe the inner parts of the corona outside a total eclipse. Today, it can be applied to the search of exoplanets around stars, providing a way to block the intense light of the star and extract the faint signal of the planet. Planned space missions, aiming at finding “sister Earths”, are exploiting this principle to produce “artificial” eclipses of stars and a discussion of them concludes the book.