"We're at the edge of a spiral galaxy, far from the galactic core." "This small planet is our Earth, its pole crowned with a circle of "Northern Lights"." "The whole planet glowing in the infrared warmth of a star we rarely think about, a star we call "Sun"." "It is almost midwinter in Ireland." "Soon the Sun will begin its journey back from the south." "Waiting for the Sun is a Stone Age building, older than the Pyramids of Egypt." "Above the entrance is a mysterious skylight built by people who understood very well the ways of the Sun." "Sunrise on the shortest day of the year; the winter solstice." "On that day, the first rays of the sunrise spear through the skylight and down a perfectly aligned passageway to penetrate to the room at the core of the structure, to mark almost magically, but with great precision," "the beginning of a new year." "This is the oldest room on Earth, its careful alignment perhaps the oldest evidence of scientific thought ever found." "Our Sun is a star, one of billions." "It has shone for five billion years and will shine for five billion more." "For us, it is the great engine of life." "If you're near the pole, the summer days never end." "The Sun shines through midnight and new days are born out of days that never ended." "There, you can almost feel the Earth rolling around beneath the sky." "Most ancient civilizations recognized the Sun as the source of all life and called it God." "They observed it with care, sometimes setting up stone markers to send that knowledge through time." "The one sure prediction in an unpredictable world:" "The Sun sets, but the Sun also rises." "Any break in that pattern once caused terror and foreboding." "The Sun is 400 times bigger than the Moon." "But the Moon is 400 times closer." "So on those rare occasions when the Moon passes exactly between us and the Sun, the disk of the Moon exactly covers the disk of the Sun." "Masked by the Moon, the Sun reveals its mysterious corona." "The eerie streamers of light heightened the mystery and increased the power of those who could predict these awesome events." "We have the eclipse records kept by the astronomer priests of ancient babylon." "They are so accurate that scientists today use them to correct computer programs." "The Sun Gate at Tihuanaco in Bolivia." "A fragment of a sun cult dating back more than 1 ,000 years." "Nearby, high in the Andes, is Lake Titicaca and in the center of the lake, The Island of the Sun." "On this island, this rocky hill was once plated in Inca gold." "Here the Sun God anointed the first Inca and sent him north through the Andes, to create an empire that grew to be as big as Europe, with many dazzling cities," "among them, the lost city of Machu Picchu." "Like the people of ancient Ireland, the farmers of the Inca Empire needed an accurate calendar." "If they planted their terraces too soon, the corn would freeze in the ground; too late, and it would never ripen." "There is one building at Machu Picchu that is like no other:" "The Torreon." "Its curved wall is pierced by an opening that is so aligned that it will project the first rays of the midwinter sunrise precisely to the edge of a carved rock, and so mark the first day of the Inca year." "The highest outcrop at Machu Picchu is called "The Hitching Post of the Sun"." "From it, the Incas imagined a great Ieash stretching out to hold onto the Sun as it paced the horizon like a restless llama." "The ancient Greeks imagined the Sun as a god who drove his chariot across the sky." "But they abandoned their myths for a more rational cosmos nearly two and a half thousand years ago." "AristotIe taught that the world was round and theorized that the Sun and planets must be carried through space, embedded in crystal spheres that were nested around the Earth, like Russian dolls." "He assumed that the Earth was at the center of the universe, misleading astronomers for centuries." "By then, the all powerful church had placed God in Aristotle's seventh heaven." "The cathedral at Frombork, on the shore of the Baltic Sea." "At about the time Columbus sailed for America, a young astronomer struggled here with the contradictions ofAristotle as he observed the tracks of the planets across the sky." "To Nicholas Copernicus, it made no sense until he made one of the great intellectual leaps of all time." "The Sun was the center of a system, the Earth, merely one of its planets." "It was a cosmos awesome enough for one of humanity's great minds:" "Galileo GaliIei." "Galileo was the first person to point a telescope at the stars." "He saw that Copernicus was right." "Galileo found that the Sun was not the flawless orb required by dogma." "It was as spotty as a teenager." "The Sun was at the center." "But the church had no intention of vacating center stage." "Galileo was put on trial before the Inquisition, a court that had the power to burn him at the stake, to inflict any torture." "They showed him their instruments, and the threat was enough." "The most respected scientist of his day signed a confession that he knew was nonsense." "Dogma had triumphed." "The cathedrals of the new age were the cathedrals of science." "And new instruments were built, not for torture, but to find new galaxies to peer into the heart of the Sun." "At first, researchers could see only the bland white face that is revealed by visible light, and sometimes the procession of mysterious dark spots that some took to be clouds." "The Earth's atmosphere clouded and distorted the image." "But in time, the great solar telescopes, like Big Bear in california, blew away the notion of a placid unchanging Sun." "People wondered what the Sun was made of, but never expected to know." "It's 93 million miles away!" "The answer was discovered in the colors of the sunlight itself." "As each element burns, it consumes its own distinctive color, writes its own signature in a dark line across the spectrum." "Our Sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium, some carbon and iron and other elements, much the same elements we are made of, but that's not surprising, since we're born of the same stars." "There had been hundreds of stories and theories to explain the aurora." "But no one suspected a connection with the Sun." "An eccentric Norwegian scientist, Kristian Birkeland, built his own world in a glass box, electrified his model Earth with its own magnetic field and showed how electrons from the Sun could ignite earthly auroras." "And he predicted that they would be identical and simultaneous at both poles." "Birkeland was right, but proof of his theories, and so much else, had to wait until we could step into space." "Space has given us new eyes." "Everything we glimpsed before can be seen anew." "A stormy night as we fly towards the coast of Australia..." "We are heading south, out over the Southern Ocean, towards Antarctica." "This is SOHO, built in England and France for the European Space Agency, with instruments from Europe and the U.S.A." "It was launched by NASA and parked a million miles from Earth at a point where the gravity of the Earth exactly balances the gravity of the Sun." "SOHO shows us the Sun as we have never seen it before." "A wider lens, the image is 30 million miles wide, the Sun blanked out, so we can see the corona jetting out into space." "Here, the two images are combined." "Billions of tons of particles fired into space at a million miles an hour sometimes, directly at our Earth." "We are saved by our magnetosphere, an invisible magnetic shield that protects us from the lethal particles that are spewed out by our Sun and other stars." "This solar storm pushed the edge of our magnetosphere twice as close to Earth as usual, disabling satellites, wiping out radio communications worldwide, and sending voltages soaring dangerously in everything from power transformers to oil pipelines." "Repairs after the last Solar Maximum cost more than $1 billion." "A century ago, space storms could pass unnoticed." "But 2,000 satellites have been launched since the last Solar Maximum." "Every aspect of our civilization depends on their uninterrupted functioning." "Sun storms can kill satellites." "They can also kill astronauts." "For long space flights, a dangerous storm is a practical certainty, and finding effective protection a necessity." "But at present, the best we can do is try to avoid Solar Maximum." "The Sun has north and south magnetic poles, just like the Earth," "But every 1 1 years, those poles reverse with unimaginable violence." "That peak of violence is called Solarmax." "The 1 1 year cycles can change, even vanish completely." "About 1 ,000 years ago, the Sun was unusually active." "It was about the time the Vikings settled a grassy new land they called "Greenland"." "Thousands moved there, but then the Sun grew quiet and the solar cycles almost stopped for a hundred years." "The average fall in temperature was just two degrees, but it was deadly enough." "The bays froze over, the people starved." "No one survived." "Recently, scientists have found that suns like ours normally produce a superflare about once every century." "A superflare would destroy half of our ozone layer, and the entire satellite fleet." "We are fortunate that our Sun seems to be much more stable than most other suns." "A tiny new spacecraft called "TRACE" brings us a view of the Sun that is still largely beyond the scope of our understanding." "Magnetic field lines burst through the surface, to unleash in seconds as much energy as the world uses in a million years." "On the horizon is the mountain that Native Americans call "The Pivot of the Sky"." "This is Kitt Peak - in Arizona, site of the National Solar Observatory." "The small telescopes on the spacecraft work in harness with large telescopes on Earth." "The combination produces results that are much more valuable than any of them could obtain alone." "This is what we call the surface of the Sun, the layer revealed by visible light." "Embedded in it are two sunspots, each big enough to swallow the Earth." "With filters and computers, we can peel away the layers as we'd turn the pages of a book, searching for a better understanding of the forces that shape our universe." "And more urgently, that shape the climate of our world." "We urgently need to know more." "So an International Solar Terrestrial Program was devised, linking satellites and a chain of observatories to create one "Great Observatory"." "A surprising discovery was the singing of the Sun." "As the Sun hums to itself, a million pure tones change as they resonate through the plasma, revealing to us tides and currents far below." "In a Munich laboratory, final testing of a satellite that is destined to be flown into the eye of a solar storm." "It is one of four identical spacecraft designed to fly together in formation to capture a unique 3 D picture of the space environment." "The formation encloses a pyramid of space and monitors everything that happens inside that space." "The tiny fleet will give us an unprecedented view of the interaction of the solar wind with our magnetosphere, from the bow wave to the distant tail." "As the millennium approached, everything was in place to make the Solarmax of 2001 a milestone in our search for understanding of the Sun." "But a mistake was made in a command sent to SOHO." "In a split second," "SOHO went from being the flagship of a space fleet to a useless piece offrozen junk." "The SOHO team refused to give up." "From all over Europe and the U.S.A., they rushed to the control center at NASA to brainstorm ideas, working to save their ship." "Months passed." "Dozens of schemes were tried." "It was like trying to raise a submarine with a fishing line." "But against all the odds, a signal hooked into the control computer." "delicately, pains takingly, tiny surges of solar power thawed out fuel for the thrusters." "Incredibly, the whole array of critical instruments proved tough enough to survive being frozen solid for 3 months." "SOHO came back from the dead." "In a nation where land is at a premium, 15,000 acres of virgin forest preserve the shrine at Ise." "It is Japan's most sacred shrine, the Shrine of the Sun Goddess, and every year, the emperor pays his respects." "No one but the emperor and the closest members of his family can enter the inner shrine." "It was the Sun Goddess herself who appointed the first emperor of Japan." "So even today, one of the world's most advanced nations still has a Sun King." "Every morning of the year, people travel to sacred places and rise in the darkness to await the daily miracle." "Every sunrise brings hope." "For some, it's the hope that we can learn to do what the humblest plant can do:" "Make clean and abundant energy directly from sunlight." "This aircraft is on its way to an altitude of more than 80,000 feet, twice as high as a jumbo jet." "It is powered only by sunlight." "It set a new world record - and poses a new challenge:" "The challenge of finding cheap and practical ways of using the Sun and the sun driven winds to bring clean and inexhaustible power to the machines of Earth." "Machines that would fit as naturally as trees and flowers into the web of life." "It is winter in the high Andes, just before sunrise on Midwinter's Day." "The first day of the Inca calendar, and by some counts, the first day of a new millennium." "It is time to prepare for the festival of Inti Raymi, time to celebrate the sun."