Hidden in plain sight along one of the Peninsula’s most popular hiking trails is a geometrically funky tower, where scientists have been quietly collecting solar measurements for nearly 50 years.
Built in 1975, the Wilcox Solar Observatory was part of a Navy project to study the sun’s magnetic field. The sun’s corona spews out a constant stream of charged particles, a solar wind that reaches speeds of up to a million miles an hour as it spreads those particles across our solar system.
Why was the Navy interested in something so solar-related? When the direction of the magnetic field within that solar wind changes, it can reduce the Navy’s ability to communicate with submarines, says Stanford physics professor J. Todd Hoeksema, who leads the university’s Solar Observatories Group, which includes the Wilcox observatory…