A solar eclipse is a rare, visually striking phenomenon. The Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, temporarily hiding our star – a geometrical alignment spanning millions of miles.

A partial solar eclipse occurs when the Moon doesn’t fully block the Sun, resulting in a gentle dimming of the sky. A total solar eclipse, however, dramatically plunges a daytime sky into blackness.

Everything has to be perfect for this to happen. An astonishing cosmic coincidence means that solar eclipses as viewed from Earth are spectacular – and unlike those anywhere else in the solar system.

For a given place on Earth, a total solar eclipse will only occur once in a few hundred years. The next total solar eclipse takes place on Wednesday, August 12 2026. The path of totality (the area where a full eclipse can be seen) will pass through parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, Spain, and a small portion of Portugal.

In Britain and Ireland, between 90% and 97.5% of the Sun will be obscured by the Moon, depending on where a person is.

The eclipse starts at 6.08pm (BST) in Glasgow and Edinburgh, 6.12pm in Galway and Dublin, 6.13pm in Manchester and Liverpool, 6.15pm in Norwich and Birmingham, 6.17pm in London, Bristol and Cardiff and 6.18pm in Truro.

The UK Health Security Agency warned that looking directly at an eclipse can cause permanent eye damage. There are two safe ways to view an eclipse: specialist eclipse glasses (or handheld solar viewers) and indirect methods.

Eclipse glasses or solar viewers must be genuine and sold by a reputable retailer. They should have specially designed filters that meet the international safety standard ISO 12312-2:2015(E). Indirect methods include projecting the Sun’s image onto a sheet of paper using a simple pinhole projector.

A solar eclipse’s appearance is wrapped up in the geometry of the bodies involved; it depends on the apparent sizes. This apparent size depends on the sizes and distances involved. The total solar eclipse we see from Earth is particularly special.

The Sun is around 400 times wider than the Moon, but also about 400 times further away, hence they appear approximately the same size in our sky. During totality, the Moon fits over the Sun like a puzzle piece slotting into place.

People are incredibly fortunate to be able to fly around our planet chasing such events, allowing eclipse watchers to gather under the Moon’s shadow. So how would solar eclipses look if we were able to travel to other planets?

Mars has two moons; the larger is Phobos, at around 14 miles across, and the smaller, Deimos, is only about 7.5 miles in diameter. Both moons are rather lumpy and irregularly shaped.

Neither moon has an apparent size large enough to produce a total solar eclipse on Mars. Phobos, being closer and larger, produces an eclipse that lasts only around 30 seconds. It’s very different from what we’re used to. Phobos appears as an oddly shaped silhouette that can cover just over one-third of the Sun.

Deimos, being smaller, and further away from Mars, appears as a small dot crossing the Sun. The eclipses of Phobos and Deimos are events we’ve seen, thanks to Nasa’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers allowing us to see eclipses on another planet.

A view from Jupiter

Jupiter has 101 moons, which includes the four large Galilean satellites. These moons can completely obscure the Sun from Jupiter, casting vast shadows across its cloud tops.

Jupiter, unfortunately, doesn’t have a solid surface, hence an observer would need to float on top of its clouds. From there, the moons would appear much larger than the Sun.

Although dramatic, this lacks the satisfying alignment we see from Earth of the Moon and Sun almost matching each other in size. The Galilean moons orbit so fast around Jupiter that such eclipses happen almost every day.

Their shadows are visible from Earth through amateur telescopes as small, distinct black dots moving across the colour bands of Jupiter. The orbits of the moons can even sometimes align such that double, or even triple, solar eclipses are visible.

Saturn has even more moons, with 274 confirmed. Similar vast shadows are seen on Saturn’s clouds during eclipses, with larger moons such as Titan causing the most dramatic displays. Saturn itself has seasons, similar to the Earth. Depending on the season, solar eclipses can happen daily on Saturn.

The limits of solar eclipses

There are parts of the solar system that will never, or very rarely, see a solar eclipse. Mercury and Venus have no moons, so unfortunately miss out on the spectacle entirely. As we go farther from the Sun, it appears smaller in the sky.

Comparatively small moons can therefore completely obscure it. From Pluto, the Sun would look like a very bright point in the sky. Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, would appear far larger and completely cover it up.

These would definitely class as total solar eclipses, but would be very different from the exquisitely balanced spectacle we see from Earth. Far out in the solar system, the moons don’t delicately fit over the Sun. Instead, they would utterly swallow it.

Throughout the solar system, solar eclipses are possible and, from some planets, frequent. From Earth, the occasional alignment of size, distance and time allows for total solar eclipses that make the Moon look as if it was made to fit perfectly over the Sun.

For a few transcendent moments, we are cast into a shadow that allows us to glimpse the solar corona peeking out from behind the Moon. There are many small, chance events that have made our planet habitable. This fleeting geometrical balance that produces our solar eclipses is a chance alignment that isn’t something functional. It’s just beautiful.

Alix Violet Freckelton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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From election debates to job interviews, language shapes our perceptions of how trustworthy other people are. This power can be used to build healthy relationships, but it can also be used to manipulate and deceive.

To better understand this darker side of building trust, my colleagues and I turned to the corporate world – a domain that offers plenty of cautionary tales. Our case study was among the most notorious, involving one of the world’s largest energy companies of the 1980s and 90s: Enron.

This Texas-based company went bankrupt in 2001 after it emerged it had been systematically falsifying its financial records on a massive scale. Its West Power division manipulated California’s electricity markets by exploiting flaws in the state’s newly deregulated system, boosting profits while triggering one of the worst energy crises in US history by creating artificial power shortages.

To manipulate the markets, Enron traders had to win – then keep – the trust of partners, clients and regulators. Subsequent US federal investigations led to the release of more than 500 of their telephone calls in 2005.

These conversations have offered our team of linguistic experts a rich source for analysing the tactics traders used to build and retain confidence in their criminal strategies.

The trust playbook

Our research combined discourse analysis (a forensically detailed breakdown of the language used and how it was delivered) with behavioural science insights to establish the Enron traders’ “trust playbook”. This, we found, comprised four steps.

1. Foster ideological alignment

Among close business partners, the Enron traders relied heavily on verbal bonding to build emotional connections. This was all about intense, emotive language including frequent swearing – locker-room talk, essentially (most conversations involved male traders only).

Regulators were often dismissed as “stupid”, “crazy” and full of “bullshit” to help cement bonds between participants while reinforcing their shared ideological stance.

This kind of language can be a powerful trust-building tool because it fosters what psychologists call identification-based trust – the highest level of interpersonal trust, rooted in emotional attunement and shared purpose.

This bonded Enron traders and their accomplices into a tight in-group with its own moral logic of: “We understand the market; they just want to stifle business.”

Inside Enron, the overt flaunting and celebration of success may also have helped override any individual moral concerns, by recasting questionable actions as innovative and market leading.

2. Be competent, credible – and benevolent

For the Enron scandal to succeed at such scale, traders needed to persuade clients and partners that they would deliver on their promises and weren’t trying to take advantage of them. To do this, they leaned heavily on energy-trading jargon to showcase their expertise and credibility.

This elicited what psychologists call competence-based trust – the sense not only that they knew what they were doing, but that they knew valuable information their partners and clients did not.

This encouraged clients and partners who were unaware of the manipulation, but whose cooperation made it possible, to go along with market moves that were later ruled unlawful.

But another important part of the playbook was benevolence – emphasising the opportunity and mutual benefit for their partners and clients. “We don’t win unless you guys win. And that’s good for you guys too.”

According to an influential 1995 study, organisational trustworthiness comprises three essential qualities: ability, integrity and benevolence – the degree of care and positive intention the recipient feels. Our analysis shows these qualities can be constructed through language to mould relationships in your favour.

3. Confide in close partners

Of all the ways we use language to build trust, confiding is probably the most powerful. It requires someone to not only demonstrate trust by sharing a secret, but consolidate it by signalling they believe the other person will keep that secret.

In the Enron case, this was information that would damage reputations, or worse, expose traders to legal consequences. Each disclosure deepened the bond of secrecy between Enron traders and their accomplices, creating feelings of mutual vulnerability while quietly normalising the wrongdoing.

The traders even developed a set of playful nicknames for their unlawful tactics, including “Death Star”, “Fat Boy” and “Get Shorty”. Members of the inner circle spent a lot of time discussing these schemes, coordinating their next moves, and celebrating the millions they were raking in.

4. Repair trust to deflect suspicion

When trust was damaged or at risk, the traders showed interesting language techniques to try to repair it. For example, metapragmatic expressions – which comment on the speaker’s own words – were used to highlight transparency: phrases like “I’ll be honest with you” or “To tell you the truth”.

If that failed, traders went on the defensive: denying (“We didn’t do anything wrong – we weren’t going to manipulate anything”); shifting blame (“They changed the rules on us in the middle of the game”); and making excuses (“Well, guess what: your pricing mechanisms encourages people to take it out of the state”).

These strategies aimed to preserve trust by eliciting the benefit of the doubt. A favourite technique was reframing: recasting suspicious events as routine and unremarkable.

This is a powerful trust-repair tool because it lets the speaker concede the facts while disputing what they mean. By shifting the dispute on to technical ground, the traders moved it away from questions of honesty to questions of expertise, where they felt they still had more room to manoeuvre.

Of course, these kinds of techniques are not unique to the Enron traders. The same strategies run through all kinds of persuasive and manipulative discourse – from social media influencers to online scammers and AI advice chatbots.

Which makes learning to read the language of trust – and how it can be abused – more important than ever.

Matteo Fuoli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.