The planet Mercury walked in front of the Sun this November 11, an almost unique opportunity that will not appear again until 2032.
This phenomenon, called “transit,” only happens with the two planets that stand between the Sun and Earth (Mercury and Venus) and occurs very rarely: thirteen times every hundred years in the case of Mercury and another thirteen every thousand. Years in Venus.
Now NASA has shared a detailed video in 4K resolution that shows this space phenomenon, which also happened on May 9, 2016.
The images captured by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory show the Sun in a variety of wavelengths of ultraviolet light and a small dot, which shows the size scale between the two space bodies.
On this occasion, the transit of Mercury, which from Earth began with the “immersion”, which is the first contact between Mercury and the solar disk. For almost five hours, Mercury was seen as a tiny black disk that “walked” across the surface of the star.
On the other hand, the last time we could see a transit of Venus was in June 2012, and the next will not be until 2117. For the next Mercury ride we will have to wait until November 13, 2032.
These types of events are not only important for science, but they are also a beautiful spectacle that demonstrate Kepler’s laws and that we are part of a world in constant motion around its star, which dominates the center of the Solar System.
The first to observe Mercury passing in front of the solar disk was the French astronomer Pierre Gassendi, on November 7, 1631, 388 years ago, although Johannes Kepler had predicted that the phenomenon could happen – also with Venus – when describing for the first time the heliocentric orbits of the planets with the laws that are named after them today.
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System and the one closest to the Sun. Therefore, it has the fastest and most eccentric orbit of all the planets, in addition to an abrupt and fascinating geology, full of craters, ridges, mountain ranges and mountains.