“Transits are an interesting celestial phenomenon, only two plants in our solar system can transit in front of the sun”.
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The planet, which is nearly 5,000km (3,032 miles) in diameter, appeared as a tiny black dot moving slowly across the face of the sun.
Around once in over a decade, Earth and Mercury align, giving amateur and professional astronomers a tiny chance to watch Mercury as it glides between the Sun and the Earth. It’s visible only with a telescope or high-powered binoculars equipped with special solar filters.
It only happens about 13 times in a century: Starting at about 7 a.m. Planetary geoscientist David Rothery told Space.com that now the transits occur in either May or November, with spring transits taking place only about a third of the time.
Travelling 48km a second, Mercury was expected to take 7½ hours to cross the face of the sun, which is about 1.39 million km in diameter, or about 109 times larger than Earth.
In Mumbai the event started at around 4.41 pm and it can be seen for a duration of about 2 hours 24 minutes. NASA is using its Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the event.
Leah Moury, 9, wasn’t even born the last time the transit was visible. It will happen again three years from now, but then not until 2032. “But the May 9/10 occurrence is the best time to see Mercury up on the disk of the Sun”, I. K. Lenin Tamilkovan, project director, Anna Science Centre-Planetarium, told The Hindu.
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Mercury is our solar system’s fastest orbiter, at an orbital period of 88 days, according to the Washington Post.
