Star Goes Black After Rare Celestial Event

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340914/title/Evening_star_goes_black_in_rare_celestial_event

This article talks about a rare event that will happen on June 5^th of this year. It will be the last chance for astronomers to see the passing of Venus between the Earth and the Sun. The planet will take six hours to march across the star’s face, and will appear as an inky black dot against the solar disk. The outline of Venus will disappear until 2117, because the planet’s orbit is slightly off, and this causes its solar transit to come in pairs spaced eight years apart with more than 100 years between pairs. During the most recent transit pair, the scientists tried to focus on timing when Venus entered and exited the Sun’s disks, in order to calculate the Sun’s size. On 2004, it was revealed that large portions of Venusian atmosphere could be seen in Earth during the transit. Scientists are hoping to not only study Venus itself during transit, but also, with the same method, observe far off exo-planets that are not seen when passing between their star and Earth.

I found this article interesting, because astronomy is a very interesting subject that has always been developing. 100 years ago no astronomer could have anticipated this transit question, or how to measure the size of the Sun by using the transit of Venus around it. The fact that we can see planets, or even determine the size of a planet because another is orbiting around it, is very impressive and is new technology, a hundred or two hundred years ago, no one would have imagined this to be possible, and because of the technology we have today we can actually evaluate this rare events. I think that it interested me because of the title, I saw the title and I opened it to read it because I found it interesting.

I don’t know if I can relate this to my life, I think that up to some level I can, because I’m really interested in astronomy, and I have always found Space very interesting and I think that studying it is very interesting. I think that the only way I can relate it to my life is the fact that I like astronomy, because it doesn’t affect my life to any level, its just something that I’ve always been interested in. The area of interaction that I can relate this to is to Human Ingenuity, because scientists that work with space and space technology have changed the way we think and the way that we see things from outer space. They have basically changed the way that we perceive things and this is very important, because we can see how new technology has changed the way that we actually see things.