Mercury Completes Rare Transit Between Sun, Earth For 21st Century; Passage Means Immense Importance To Science [VIDEO]
ByThe planet Mercury made a rare transit by passing straight across the face of the Sun for the first time in 10 years and casted a shadow all-over Africa, Western Europe, South America and the eastern part of North America where thousands of onlookers to this rare planetary occurrence lift their heads to the sky.
Although the event is unattainable and risky to view through the naked eye or binoculars, astronomers worldwide are offered the great opportunity to view the event through filtered telescopes. Live viewing streaming straight from space and ground telescopes were also made available online, the BBC reported.
This rare transit happens when Sun, Mercury and Earth will all fall in a line directly on point. Since, Mercury's orbit has a decline of about 7 degrees compared with Earth's orbit. Meaning, there are only two spots where the two planets could plausibly line up with the sun, the report added. The actual footage had shown Mercury as a minute black circle, smaller but went darker than most sunspots which were slowly traversing the Sun's giant yellow disc.
Meanwhile, Open University Professor David Rothery said the celestial event did not illustrate any new narrative and scientific opportunities to studies but remained special, even so. Anything new has been added to the things researcher and astronomers already knew, but the historic transit of Mercury was of immense importance, he added.
Most planets are mostly hard to be seen because most of them lost in the glare of their central star. In total, this kind of rare transit of Mercury happens for about 13 or 14 times in every 100 years. The last one heppened in 2006, Mercury then is expected to come back in 2019 or sometime in 2039, the report quipped.
Watch a short video clipped from the NASA footage:
Latest views of today's #MercuryTransit show the planet passing in front of the sun from @NASASunEarth:https://t.co/1yXs5ykQPh
— NASA (@NASA) May 9, 2016
