American space agency NASA has shared a post on its Instagram handle, describing a rare celestial event that took place about a decade ago. The event - transit of Venus across the face of Sun - was captured by the agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
"She was one of the rare ones, so effortlessly herself, and the world loved her for it," NASA said in the post, which carries the photo of the Sun and a dot-like Venus. It then described why solar transits are important events for astronomers.
"Transits help astronomers study the atmospheric composition and orbit of planets," said NASA.
Interestingly, it added that the next transit will happen in again after almost 100 years. "Venus' solar transits happen in pairs just over 100 years apart: the last pair of transits occurred in 2004 and 2012, and the next will not happen until 2117," said NASA.
"The solar transit in 2012 lasted nearly 7 hours and was visible worldwide, with observers on all seven continents able to view the event," it added.
The space agency posted the information about 10 hours ago and since then, it has received close to four lakh likes. Many users are amazed to see the close-up of the Sun in the photo and posted comments like "Wow", "Awesome" and "Beautiful".
What is a transit?
According to NASA, a transit is when one object crosses in front of another in space. "This can happen in a lot of different ways. One example is when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. The Moon is "transiting" the Sun."
If the orbit of a planet is lined up just right, the planet will pass in front of (called transit) the star that it orbits. Looking for transits is one of the ways that scientists find exoplanets, said NASA, adding that the light from the star dims by a very small amount during the transit which is measured by astronomers.
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