Little sand. ESA spacecraft captured the movement of Mercury against the background of the Sun (video)

Solar Orbiter was able to see how the first planet from the Sun was moving near our star. Space writes that the close pass of Mercury gives the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft a better view of the Sun.

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The transit of any planet against the background of its parent star is called planetary transit. At the same time, several vehicles of the Solar Orbiter spacecraft were able to photograph such a transit of Mercury against the background of the Sun. Scientists created several short videos from these images.

In the resulting images, Mercury appears as a black disk moving in the background to the lower right of the Sun. And this little black dot is very different from the dark sunspots seen much higher up from the Sun. These are regions on a star where famous solar flares arise and coronal mass ejections, i.e. emissions of energy and plasma into space, occur. The smallest planet in the solar system is particularly visible in images after it leaves the solar disk and becomes visible against the background of gas structures in the star’s atmosphere.

Thanks to the transit of Mercury, one of the Solar Orbiter vehicles called SPICE was able to get the best view of the Sun. This instrument is designed to separate sunlight into its constituent colours, and in this way it can identify atoms in different layers of a star as they exist at different temperatures.

According to scientists from ESA, thanks to the new images, they not only got new images of Mercury, but most importantly, they managed to see the passage of the planet against the background of various layers of the Sun’s atmosphere. Thus, the Solar Orbiter spacecraft will be able to better tune its instruments for further observation of the star. Scientists believe that by studying this transit of Mercury, it is possible to improve the quality of data about the Sun itself, collected by the ESA spacecraft.

Such planetary transits were useful to astronomers long before the observation of Mercury transiting against the background of the Sun. Hundreds of years ago, early astronomers used the transits of planets in front of the Sun to estimate the size of the solar system. Skywatchers from various distant regions tracked the transit times of the planets against the background of the Sun and then compared the results. Scientists in the past were able to calculate the distance between the Sun and Earth using small time differences as well as the distance between observations and trigonometry.

Until now, planetary transits have been used to detect exoplanets, i.e. planets outside the solar system. When these planets pass through the background of their star, they obscure the light stream from the star for a while. In this way, the existence of a planet can be discovered, and information about its rotation period and even its size can be obtained through long-term observations.

This planet detection method, called the transit method, is particularly useful for searching for so-called “hot Jupiters.” These are gas giants that may be larger than Jupiter, but they are very close to their star and their rotation period is only a few days. That is, a year on such planets may only last a few Earth days.

The Solar Orbiter will make its next approach to the Sun in April of this year, and already in June, ESA scientists will be able to learn more about Mercury as the BepiColombo spacecraft will fly towards the planet.

As already written Focus, scientists have discovered the lightest planet outside the solar system and made a direct image of it. This planet is a gas giant and is several times larger than Jupiter and is relatively close to us.

Moreover Focus He wrote that a strong flare occurred on the Sun recently, and this event was imaged by the SDO spacecraft.