Tuesday, the European Space Agency shared a stunning video its Solar Orbiter captured of Mercury moving across the horizon of the Sun. The video shared online puts the Sun’s massive scope into full view, even thrusting some of us into a downright existential spiral. The video was captured using the Solar Orbiter’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), allow researchers to capture the first planet of the Sun just as it passed in front of the star’s gaseous structures.
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“It’s not just looking at Mercury passing in front of the Sun, but passing in front of the different layers of the atmosphere,” Miho Janvier, an official with the ESA said in a press release.
While the capturing of the video is wonderful enough in its own right, the event allowed the ESA to tweak its instruments aboard the Solar Orbiter to allow it to capture even better photos and images in the future.
“Most recently, transits have become the most successful way to find planets around other stars. As the planet moves across the face of the star, the bright surface is marginally covered by the planet’s silhouette and so drops a tiny bit in brightness. The regular repeating way this happens allows the planet’s size and orbit to be calculated,” the ESA says of the event.
It adds, “Any brightness recorded by the instrument within Mercury’s disc must be caused by the way the instrument transmits its light, called the point spread function. The better this is known, the better it can be removed. So be studying this event, the quality of the Solar Orbiter data can be ever further improved.
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