Mysteries of Light

He embraces sunlight. In all its forms. As chief of the building environment division of NIST's Building and Fire Research Laboratory, Fanney has been studying the efficiency of solar energy devices for almost 30 years.

On his roof facility, he has solar panels, shingles, slates, slabs and modules arrayed like flowers in a garden.

Downstairs, in a huge, ground-floor bay, he keeps NIST's four-wheel solar tracking test bed, which can be loaded with solar arrays, towed outside and kept aimed directly at the sun throughout the day.

All this used to be for a niche market: things like calculators and solar-powered road signs, Fanney said last week. No more. With the largest portion of all greenhouse gas -- 37 percent -- now emitted in the production of energy for buildings, interest in solar power has soared, he said, and companies have long waiting lists for the purchase of solar panels.

He has seen the technology improve and the industry grow from one with companies run out of garages to one with the interest of giant corporations. "I think it's great," he said. "I think it's going to be one of the many ways that we help solve our energy situation. I'm excited about it. Absolutely."

Plus, it is now possible, under certain circumstances, for a solar-powered building to generate excess electricity that can be sold back to a utility, he said. And that has people's attention.

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The sun has long had space scientists' attention at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

Goddard has a pair of new $43 million satellites that just started eyeballing the sun and another ready to be launched there in about two years.

Even though it's only a middle-of-the-road star, its proximity is tantalizing. The next closest stars are the Alpha Centauri trio, about 25 trillion miles away.

Stars are often classified in seven categories according to temperature -- O, B, A, F, G, K and M -- with O being relatively warm and M relatively cool.

The natural convulsions of our G-class star, caused by spasms of electrical activity, rise in frequency for 11 years and then fall for 11 more, creating so-called solar storms that hurl bursts of energy at the Earth.