(ORDO NEWS) — A spacecraft surveying the wild paths of our magnificent Sun captured an event rarely seen from our position here on the surface of the Earth.
On January 3, 2023, the Solar Orbiter, led by the European Space Agency, observed the innermost planets of the solar system gliding across the solar disk; a small black dot in the background of a raging flame.
This type of event is called a transit and occurs when a smaller body, such as a planet or moon, passes in front of a star, blocking a small amount of its light.
Although an object in orbit is often reduced to a mere shadow, transit events can teach us many interesting things.
If you’ve heard the term recently, it’s probably because it’s the main tool in the suite for detecting planets outside the solar system or exoplanets.
Space telescopes such as Kepler and TESS look at the stars for long periods of time, looking for faint, regular dips in starlight that are signs of a transiting exoplanet.
This subtle flickering of the shadow not only indicates the presence of a body in orbit, but can also give a clue about its structure.
When an exoplanet, or even a closer planet like Mercury or the moon for that matter, passes in front of its parent star, some of the star’s light is filtered through whatever atmosphere it may harbor.
Analyzing how the light differs from the light of naked stars could allow scientists to determine the composition of the gas.
Scientists have used this method to study the atmosphere of Venus here at home, as well as a growing number of exoplanet atmospheres, and.
Mercury’s atmosphere has also been studied using transit data, but Solar Orbiter used a rare event to do something else: calibrate its instruments.
“This is a certified black object. traveling across your field of vision,” explains ESA astronomer Daniel Müller.
Against the background of the disk of the Sun, Mercury should be a completely dark spot. Therefore, any light observed on the planet is most likely created by a telescope.
This effect is known as the point spread function, and understanding how it happens and how strong it is helps astronomers remove it from the Solar Orbiter science data.
This, in turn, means that the analysis performed will be more accurate.
Mercury, the world closest to the Sun, is one of the least explored planets in the solar system, but not without secrets.
We don’t know how or where it formed, why its core seems so huge, whether it has intrinsic geological activity, or why it has a global magnetic field while Venus and Mars don’t.
The transit data won’t give us the answers to these questions – there’s currently a separate space probe mission for that – but it’s a great reminder that even the smallest planets can provide important answers.
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