One year ago, I posted a fun problem of predicting when we will have the very last total solar eclipse viewable from Earth. It was a fun calculation to do, and the answer seemed to be 700 million years from now, but I have decided to revisit it with an important new feature added: The slow but steady evolution of the sun’s diameter. For educators, you can visit the Desmos module that Luke Henke and I put together for his students.
The apparent lunar diameter during a total solar eclipse depends on whether the moon is at perigee or apogee, or at some intermediate distance from Earth. This is represented by the two red curved lines and the red area in between them. The upper red line is the angular diameter viewed from Earth when the moon is at perigee (closest to Earth) and will have the largest possible diameter. The lower red curve is the moon’s angular diameter at apogee (farthest from Earth) when its apparent diameter will be the smallest possible. As I mentioned in the previous posting, these two curves will slowly drift to smaller values because the Moon is moving away from Earth at about 3cm per year. Using the best current models for lunar orbit evolution, these curves will have the shapes shown in the above graph and can be approxmately modeled by the quadratic equations:
Perigee: Diameter = T2 – 27T +2010 arcseconds
Apogee: Diameter = T2 -23T +1765 arcseconds.
where T is the time since the present in multiples of 100 million years, so a time 300 million years ago is T=-3, and a time 500 million years in the future is T=+5.
The blue region in the graph shows the change in the diameter of the Sun and is bounded above by its apparent diameter at perihelion (Earth closest to Sun) and below by its farthest distance called aphelion. This is a rather narrow band of possible angular sizes, and the one of interest will depend on where Earth is in its orbit around the Sun AND the fact that the elliptical orbit of Earth is slowly rotating within the plane of its orbit so that at the equinoxes when eclipses can occur, the Sun will vary in distance between its perihelion and aphelion distances over the course of 100,000 years or so. We can’t really predict exactly where the Earth will be between these limits so our prediction will be uncertain by at least 100,000 years. With any luck, however, we can estimate the ‘date’ to within a few million years.
Now in previous calculations it was assumed that the physical diameter of the Sun remained constant and only the Earth-Sun distance affected the angular diameter of the Sun. In fact, our Sun is an evolving star whose physical diameter is slowly increasing due to its evolution ‘off the Main Sequence’. Stellar evolution models can determine how the Sun’s radius changes. The figure below comes from the Yonsei-Yale theoretical models by Kim et al. 2002; (Astrophysical Journal Supplement, v.143, p.499) and Yi et al. 2003 (Astrophysical Journal Supplement, v.144, p.259).
The blue line shows that between 1 billion years ago and today, the solar radius has increased by about 5%. We can approximate this angular diameter change using the two linear equations:
Perihelion: Diameter = 18T + 1973 arcseconds.
Aphelion: Diameter = 17T + 1908 arrcseconds.
where T is the time since the present in multiples of 100 million years, so a time 300 million years ago is T=-3, and a time 500 million years in the future is T=+5. When we plot these four equations we get
There are four intersection points of interest. They can be found by setting the lunar and solar equations equal to each other and using the Quadratic Formula to solve for T in each of the four possible cases.:
Case A : T= 456 million years ago. The angular diameter of the Sun and Moon are 1890 arcseconds. At apogee, this is the smallest angular diameter the Moon can have at the time when the Sun has its largest diameter at perihelion. Before this time, you could have total solar eclipses when the Moon is at apogee. After this time the Moon’s diameter is too small for it to block out the large perihelion Sun disk and from this time forward you only have annular eclipses at apogee.
Case B : T = 330 million years ago and the angular diameters are 1852 arcseconds. At this time, the apogee disk of the Moon when the Sun disk is smallest at aphelion just covers the solar disk. Before this time, you could have total solar eclipses even when the Moon was at apogee and the Sun was between its aphelion and perihelion distance. After this time, the lunar disk at apogee was too small to cover even the small aphelion solar disk and you only get annular eclipses from this time forward.
Case C : T = 86 million years from now and the angular diameters are both 1988 arcseconds. At this time the large disk of the perigee Moon covers the large disk of the perihelion Sun and we get a total solar eclipse. However before this time, the perigee lunar disk is much larger than the Sun and although this allows a total solar eclipese to occur, more and more of the corona is covered by the lunar disk until the brightest portions can no longer be seen. After this time, the lunar disk at perigee is smaller than the solar disk between perihelion and aphelion and we get a mixture of total solar eclipses and annular eclipses.
Case D : T = 246 million years from now and the angular diameters are 1950 arcseconds. The largest lunar disk size at perigee is now as big as the solar disk at aphelion, but after this time, the maximum perigee lunar disk becomes smaller than the solar disk and we only get annular eclipses. This is approximately the last epoc when we can get total solar eclipses regardless of whether the Sun is at aphelion or perihelion, or the Moon is at apogee or perigee. The sun has evolved so that its disk is always too large for the moon to ever cover it again even when the Sun is at its farthest distance from Earth.
The answer to our initial question is that the last total solar eclipse is likely to occur about 246 million years from now when we include the slow increase in the solar diameter due to its evolution as a star.
Once again, if you want to use the Desmos interactive math module to exolore this problem, just visit the Solar Eclipses – The Last Total Eclipse? The graphical answers in Desmos will differ from the four above cases due to rounding errors in the Desmos lab, but the results are in close accord with the above analysis solved using quadratic roots.
