Article ID: CBB410445049

The Solar Variations Project at Lowell Observatory. II: A 63-Year Quest to Measure the Sun’s Variability, and What Was Discovered Instead (2023)

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Though enjoying complete intellectual and financial independence during the first half century of its existence, Lowell Observatory was forced to change its model after World War II, as science itself increasingly morphed into 'Big Science’. The first major source of outside funding in the Observatory’s history was the US Weather Bureau, which supported a project to understand weather on a planetary scale by studying weather on Mars and Jupiter and—more enduringly—to record possible variations of solar irradiance. The latter was a long-standing problem which had occupied scientists such as Charles Greeley Abbot at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for decades, and had so far led to inconclusive results. At Lowell, it was to be approached by an innovative, if indirect, method involving the monitoring of changes of brightness in sunlight reflected from the cloudy atmospheres of distant Uranus and Neptune—a method whose time had just come, as photoelectric photometry had only just developed to the point where its implementation was feasible. Even so, it required a very high level of specialized knowledge and skill to be successful, and the Observatory was fortunate in recruiting young Harold L. Johnson, who was the best person possible for the job, to devise the instrumentation and design as well as provide overall supervision to the project from its inception until 1959 when he left Lowell. After his departure, the project, employing his experimental design, continued under the directorship of John S. Hall, mainly through the efforts of two Polish astronomers, K. Serkowski and M. Jerzykiewicz, who in 1966 concluded that, though the measures of Uranus could not be relied on owing to its uncertain oblateness, the detected variations of brightness of Neptune might be real, and if so, could be due either to changes in Neptune’s atmosphere or to variations of the Sun. Air Force funding ran out in 1966. However, through the advocacy of climatologist J. Murray Mitchell Jr, the project was revived in 1971, with Saturn’s large satellite Titan as an additional target. Jerzykiewicz returned to Lowell for two years before going back to Poland, whereupon he turned the project over in 1973 to G. Wesley Lockwood. The latter continued the observations of Uranus, Neptune and Titan until 2016, logging in addition atmospheric extinction data through two global volcanic episodes, El Chichόn and Pinatubo. With the advent of the solar satellite era after 1980, when more direct methods of determining solar irradiance became available, the planetary observations increasingly adopted as their new goal the monitoring of planetary seasonal variability. An on-again, off-again anti-correlation of Neptune’s brightness with the sunspot number was suspected at Lowell but not finally and definitively established as a Sun-Neptune planetary weather effect until Berkeley scientists did so in 2023. However, probably the most important discovery made during the long-running Lowell programme was a serendipitous one. From the monitoring of solar-type stars originally included as standards of comparison for the planetary brightness measures, it was found that the brightness of some of these stars varied considerably more than the Sun does. Thus, as a byproduct of the Lowell project, a new vigorous area of ongoing research was established that continues to the present day.

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Authors & Contributors
Orchiston, Wayne
Case, Stephen
Crowe, Michael J.
Cunningham, Clifford J.
Goldstein, Bernard R.
Golub, Leon
Journals
Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
Journal for the History of Astronomy
Acta Baltica historiae et philosophiae scientiarum
Archaeoastronomy: The Journal of Astronomy in Culture
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Publishers
Reaktion Books
British Archaeological Reports
World Scientific
Concepts
Sun
Solar astronomy
Astronomy
Solar system; planets
Moons of other planets
Photometry
People
Johnson, Harold Lester
Galilei, Galileo
Herschel, John Frederick William
Herschel, William
Kangxi, Emperor of China
Lowell, Percival
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
17th century
20th century
Ancient
Places
Greece
Mexico
Rome (Italy)
China
France
Japan
Institutions
European Space Agency (ESA)
International Astronomical Union (IAU)
Jesuits (Society of Jesus)
Lowell Observatory
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Observatorio Astronómico Nacional
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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