A transit of Venus takes place when Venus passes directly between the Sun and the Earth (or any other superior planet), becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus is visible as a small black circle moving across the face of the Sun.
Transits of Venus reoccur periodically. A pair of transits takes place eight years apart in December (Gregorian calendar) followed by a gap of 121.5 years, before another pair occurs eight years apart in June, followed by another gap, of 105.5 years. The dates advance by about two days per 243-year cycle. The periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395 commensurabilities. The last pairs of transits occurred on 8 June 2004 and 5–6 June 2012. The next pair of transits will occur on 10–11 December 2117 and 8 December 2125.
Transits of Venus were in the past used to determine the size of the Solar System. The 2012 transit has provided research opportunities, particularly in the refinement of techniques to be used in the search for exoplanets.
The orbit of Venus has an inclination of 3.39° relative to that of the Earth, and so passes under (or over) the Sun when viewed from the Earth. [1] A transit occurs when Venus reaches conjunction with the Sun whilst also passing through the Earth's orbital plane, and passes directly across the face of the Sun.[ citation needed ] [note 1] Sequences of transits usually repeat every 243 years, after which Venus and Earth have returned to nearly the same point in their respective orbits. During the Earth's 243 sidereal orbital periods, which total 88,757.3 days, Venus completes 395 sidereal orbital periods of 224.701 days each, which is equal to 88,756.9 Earth days. This period of time corresponds to 152 synodic periods of Venus. [2]
A pair of transits takes place eight years apart in December, followed by a gap of 121.5 years, before another pair occurs eight years apart in June, followed by another gap, of 105.5 years. Other patterns are possible within the 243-year cycle, because of the slight mismatch between the times when the Earth and Venus arrive at the point of conjunction. Prior to 1518, the pattern of transits was 8, 113.5, and 121.5 years, and the eight inter-transit gaps before the AD 546 transit were 121.5 years apart. The current pattern will continue until 2846, when it will be replaced by a pattern of 105.5, 129.5, and 8 years. Thus, the 243-year cycle is relatively stable, but the number of transits and their timing within the cycle vary over time. [2] Since the 243:395 Earth:Venus commensurability is only approximate, there are different sequences of transits occurring 243 years apart, each extending for several thousand years, which are eventually replaced by other sequences. For instance, there is a series which ended in 541 BC, and the series which includes 2117 only started in AD 1631. [2]
Ancient Indian, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chinese observers knew of Venus and recorded the planet's motions. [3] Pythagoras is credited with realizing that the so-called morning and evening stars were really both the planet Venus. There is no evidence that any of these cultures observed planetary transits.[ citation needed ] It has been proposed that frescoes found at the Maya site at Mayapan may contain a pictorial representation of the 12th or 13th century transits. [4]
The Persian polymath Avicenna claimed to have observed Venus as a spot on the Sun. There was a transit on 24 May 1032, but Avicenna did not give the date of his observation, and modern scholars have questioned whether he could have observed the transit from his location; he may have mistaken a sunspot for Venus. He used his alleged transit observation to help establish that Venus was, at least sometimes, below the Sun in Ptolemaic cosmology, [5] i.e., the sphere of Venus comes before the sphere of the Sun when moving out from the Earth in the then prevailing geocentric model. [6] [7]
Date(s) of transits | Time (UTC) | Notes [8] | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Start | Mid | End | ||
7 December 1631 | 03:51 | 05:19 | 06:47 | Predicted by Kepler |
4 December 1639 | 14:57 | 18:25 | 21:54 | First transit to be observed, by Horrocks and Crabtree |
6 June 1761 | 02:02 | 05:19 | 08:37 | Lomonosov, Chappe d'Auteroche, and others observe from Russia; Mason and Dixon observe from the Cape of Good Hope. John Winthrop observes from St. John's, Newfoundland |
3–4 June 1769 | 19:15 | 22:25 | 01:35 | Cook sent to Tahiti to observe the transit, Chappe to San José del Cabo, Baja California, and Maximilian Hell to Vardø, Norway. |
9 December 1874 | 01:49 | 04:07 | 06:26 | Pietro Tacchini leads expedition to Muddapur, India. A French expedition goes to New Zealand's Campbell Island, and a British expedition travels to Hawaii. |
6 December 1882 | 13:57 | 17:06 | 20:15 | |
8 June 2004 | 05:13 | 08:20 | 11:26 | Various media networks globally broadcast live video of the Venus transit. |
5–6 June 2012 | 22:09 | 01:29 | 04:49 | Visible in its entirety from the Pacific and Eastern Asia, with the beginning of the transit visible from North America and the end visible from Europe. First transit while a spacecraft orbits Venus. |
The German astronomer Johannes Kepler predicted the 1631 transit in 1627, but his methods were not sufficiently accurate to predict that it could not be seen throughout most of Europe. As a consequence, astronomers were unable to use his prediction to observe the event. [9]
The first recorded observation of a transit of Venus was made by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks from his home at Carr House in Much Hoole, near Preston, on 4 December 1639 (24 November O.S.). His friend William Crabtree observed the transit from nearby Broughton. [10] Kepler had predicted transits in 1631 and 1761 and a near miss in 1639. Horrocks corrected Kepler's calculation for the orbit of Venus, realized that transits of Venus would occur in pairs 8 years apart, and so predicted the transit of 1639. [11] Although he was uncertain of the exact time, he calculated that the transit was to begin at approximately 15:00. Horrocks focused the image of the Sun through a simple telescope and onto paper, where he could observe the Sun without damaging his eyesight. After waiting for most of the day, he eventually saw the transit when clouds obscuring the Sun cleared at about 15:15, half an hour before sunset. His observations allowed him to make a well-informed guess for the diameter of Venus and an estimate of the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun (59.4 million mi (95.6 million km; 0.639 AU)). His observations were not published until 1661, well after Horrocks's death. [11] [note 2] Horrocks based his calculation on the (false) presumption that each planet's size was proportional to its rank from the Sun, not on the parallax effect as used by the 1761 and 1769 and following experiments.[ citation needed ]
In 1663, the Scottish mathematician James Gregory had suggested in his Optica Promota that observations of a transit of Mercury, at widely spaced points on the surface of the Earth, could be used to calculate the solar parallax, and hence the astronomical unit by means of triangulation. Aware of this, the English astronomer Edmond Halley made observations of such a transit on 28 October O.S. 1677 from the island of Saint Helena, but was disappointed to find that only Richard Towneley in the Lancashire town of Burnley, Lancashire had made another accurate observation of the event, whilst Gallet, at Avignon, had simply recorded that it had occurred. Halley was not satisfied that the resulting calculation of the solar parallax of 45" was accurate.[ citation needed ]
In a paper published in 1691, and a more refined one in 1716, Halley proposed that more accurate calculations could be made using measurements of a transit of Venus, although the next such event was not due until 1761 (6 June N.S., 26 May O.S.). [12] In an attempt to observe the first transit of the pair, astronomers from Britain (William Wales and Captain James Cook), Austria (Maximilian Hell), and France (Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche and Guillaume Le Gentil) took part in expeditions to places that included Siberia, Newfoundland, and Madagascar. [13] Most of them observed at least part of the transit. Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason succeeded in observing the transit at the Cape of Good Hope, [14] but Nevil Maskelyne and Robert Waddington were less successful on Saint Helena, although they put their voyage to good use by trialling the lunar-distance method of finding longitude. [15]
Venus was generally thought to possess an atmosphere prior to the transit of 1761, but the possibility that it could be detected during a transit seems not to have been considered. The discovery of the planet’s atmosphere has long been attributed to the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, after he observed the 1761 transit from the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. [16] The attribution to Lomonosov seems to have arisen from comments made in 1966 by the astronomy writer Willy Ley, who wrote that Lomonosov had inferred the existence of an atmosphere from his observation of a luminous arc. [17] The attribution has since then been questioned. [18]
For the 1769 transit, scientists travelled to places all over the world. The Czech astronomer Christian Mayer was invited by the Russian empress Catherine the Great to observe the transit in Saint Petersburg with Anders Johan Lexell, while other members of the Russian Academy of Sciences went to eight other locations in the Russian Empire under the general coordination of Stepan Rumovsky. [19] King George III of the United Kingdom had the King's Observatory built near his summer residence at Richmond Lodge, so that he and the Astronomer Royal, Stephen Demainbray, could observe the transit. [20] [21] Hell and his assistant János Sajnovics travelled to Vardø, Norway. Wales and Joseph Dymond went to Hudson Bay to observe the event. In Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society erected three temporary observatories and appointed a committee led by David Rittenhouse. Observations were made by a group led by Dr. Benjamin West in Providence, Rhode Island, [22] Observations were also made from Tahiti by James Cook and Charles Green at a location still known as Point Venus. [23] [note 3]
D'Auteroche went to San José del Cabo in what was then New Spain to observe the transit with two Spanish astronomers (Vicente de Doz and Salvador de Medina). For his trouble he died in an epidemic of yellow fever there shortly after completing his observations. [25] Only 9 of 28 in the entire party returned home alive. [26] [ page needed ] Le Gentil spent over eight years travelling in an attempt to observe either of the transits. Whilst abroad he was declared dead, and as a result he lost his wife and possessions. Upon his return he regained his seat in the French Academy and remarried. [13] Under the influence of the Royal Society, the astronomer Ruđer Bošković travelled to Istanbul, but arrived after the transit had happened.[ citation needed ]
In 1771, using the combined 1761 and 1769 transit data, the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande calculated the astronomical unit to have a value of 153 ± 1 million kilometres (95.07 ± 0.62 million miles). The precision was less than had been hoped for because of the black drop effect. The value obtained was still an improvement on the calculations made by Horrocks. [13] [note 4] Hell published his results in 1770, which included a value for the astronomical unit of 151.7 million kilometres (94.3 million miles). Lalande challenged the accuracy and authenticity of observations obtained by the Hell expedition, but later wrote an article in Journal des sçavans (1778), in which he retracted his comments.[ citation needed ]
Observations of the transits of 1874 and 1882 worked to refine the value obtained for the astronomical unit. Three expeditions—from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States—were sent to the Kerguelen Archipelago for the 1874 observations. [27] The American astronomer Simon Newcomb combined the data from the last four transits, and he arrived at a value of 149.59 ± 0.31 million kilometres (92.95 ± 0.19 million miles). [13] [note 5]
Scientific organisations led by the European Southern Observatory organised a network of amateur astronomers and students to measure Earth's distance from the Sun during the transit of 2004. [28] The participants' observations allowed a calculation of the astronomical unit (AU) of 149,608,708 ± 11,835 kilometres (92,962,541 ± 7,354 miles), which differed from the accepted value by 0.007%. [29]
During the 2004 transit, scientists attempted to measure the loss of light as Venus blocked out some of the Sun's light, in order to refine techniques for discovering extrasolar planets. [30]
The 2012 transit of Venus provided scientists with research opportunities as well, in particular in regard to the study of exoplanets. The event additionally was the first of its kind to be documented from space, photographed aboard the International Space Station by NASA astronaut Don Pettit. The measurement of the dips in a star's brightness during a transit is one observation that can help astronomers find exoplanets. Unlike the 2004 Venus transit, the 2012 transit occurred during an active phase of the 11-year activity cycle of the Sun, and it gave astronomers an opportunity to practise picking up a planet's signal around a "spotty" variable star. Measurements made of the apparent diameter of a planet such as Venus during a transit allows scientists to estimate exoplanet sizes. Observation made of the atmosphere of Venus from Earth-based telescopes and the Venus Express gave scientists a better opportunity to understand the intermediate level of Venus's atmosphere than was possible from either viewpoint alone, and provided new information about the climate of the planet. Spectrographic data of the atmosphere of Venus can be compared to studies of the atmospheres of exoplanets. The Hubble Space Telescope used the Moon as a mirror to study light from the atmosphere of Venus, and so determine its composition. [31] [32]
Date(s) of transit | Time (UTC) | Notes [8] | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Start | Mid | End | ||
10–11 December 2117 | 23:58 | 02:48 | 05:38 | Visible in entirety in eastern China, Korea, Japan, south of Russian Far East, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Australia. Partly visible in Central Asia, the Middle East, south part of Russia, in India, most of Africa, and on extreme U.S. West Coast. |
8 December 2125 | 13:15 | 16:01 | 18:48 | Visible in entirety in South America and the eastern U.S. Partly visible in Western U.S., Europe, Africa, and Oceania. |
11 June 2247 | 08:42 | 11:33 | 14:25 | Visible in entirety in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Partly visible in East Asia and Indonesia, and in North and South America. |
9 June 2255 | 01:08 | 04:38 | 08:08 | Visible in entirety in Russia, India, China, and western Australia. Partly visible in Africa, Europe, and the western U.S. |
12–13 December 2360 | 22:32 | 01:44 | 04:56 | Visible in entirety in Australia and most of Indonesia. Partly visible in Asia, Africa, and the western half of the Americas. |
10 December 2368 | 12:29 | 14:45 | 17:01 | Visible in entirety in South America, western Africa, and the U.S. East Coast. Partly visible in Europe, the western U.S., and the Middle East. |
12 June 2490 | 11:39 | 14:17 | 16:55 | Visible in entirety through most of the Americas, western Africa, and Europe. Partly visible in eastern Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. |
10 June 2498 | 03:48 | 07:25 | 11:02 | Visible in entirety through most of Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and eastern Africa. Partly visible in eastern Americas, Indonesia, and Australia. |
Transits usually occur in pairs, because the length of eight Earth years is almost the same as 13 years on Venus. This approximate conjunction is not precise enough to produce a triplet, as Venus arrives 22 hours earlier each time. The last transit not to be part of a pair was in 1396 (the planet passed slightly above the disc of the Sun in 1388); [33] the next one will be in 3089.[ citation needed ]
After 243 years the transits of Venus return. The 1874 transit is a member of the 243-year cycle #1. The 1882 transit is a member of #2. The 2004 transit is a member of #3, and the 2012 transit is a member of #4. The 2117 transit is a member of #1, and so on. However, the ascending node (December transits) of the orbit of Venus moves backwards after each 243 years so the transit of 2854 is the last member of series #3 instead of series #1. The descending node (June transits) moves forwards, so the transit of 3705 is the last member of #2.[ citation needed ]
Over longer periods of time, new series of transits will start and old series will end. Unlike the saros series for lunar eclipses, it is possible for a transit series to restart after a hiatus. The transit series also vary much more in length than the saros series.[ citation needed ]
Sometimes Venus only grazes the Sun during a transit. In this case it is possible that in some areas of the Earth a full transit can be seen while in other regions there is only a partial transit (no second or third contact). The last transit of this type was on 6 December 1631, and the next such transit will occur on 13 December 2611. It is also possible that a transit of Venus can be seen in some parts of the world as a partial transit, while in others Venus misses the Sun. Such a transit last occurred on 19 November 541 BC, and the next transit of this type will occur on 14 December 2854. [2] These effects are due to parallax, since the size of the Earth affords different points of view with slightly different lines of sight to Venus and the Sun. It can be demonstrated by closing an eye and holding a finger in front of a smaller more distant object; when the viewer opens the other eye and closes the first, the finger will no longer be in front of the object.[ citation needed ]
The simultaneous occurrence of transits of Mercury and Venus does occur, but extremely infrequently. Such an event last occurred on 22 September 373,173 BC and will next occur on 26 July 69,163, [34] and again on 29 March 224,504. [35] The simultaneous occurrence of a solar eclipse and a transit of Venus is currently possible, but very rare. The next solar eclipse occurring during a transit of Venus will be on 5 April 15,232. [36]
The Canadian rock band Three Days Grace titled their fourth studio album Transit of Venus and announced the album title and release date on June 5, 2012, the date of the last transit of Venus. The album's first song, "Sign of the Times", references the transit in the lyric "Venus is passing by".
The progressive rock band Big Big Train have a song titled "The Transit of Venus Across the Sun". It is the fifth track on their ninth album Folklore (Big Big Train album).
The Transit of Venus March was written by John Philip Sousa in 1883 to commemorate the 1882 transit.
The astronomical unit is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to 149,597,870,700 m. Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance, before its modern redefinition in 2012.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is a terrestrial planet and is the closest in mass and size to its orbital neighbour Earth. Venus has by far the densest atmosphere of the terrestrial planets, composed mostly of carbon dioxide with a thick, global sulfuric acid cloud cover. At the surface it has a mean temperature of 737 K and a pressure 92 times that of Earth's at sea level. These extreme conditions compress carbon dioxide into a supercritical state at Venus's surface.
Vulcan was a proposed planet that some pre-20th century astronomers thought existed in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. Speculation about, and even purported observations of, intermercurial bodies or planets date back to the beginning of the 17th century. The case for their probable existence was bolstered by the support of the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, who had predicted the existence of Neptune using disturbances in the orbit of Uranus. By 1859 he had confirmed unexplained peculiarities in Mercury's orbit and predicted that they had to be the result of the gravitational influence of another unknown nearby planet or series of asteroids. A French amateur astronomer's report that he had observed an object passing in front of the Sun that same year led Le Verrier to announce that the long sought after planet, which he gave the name Vulcan, had been discovered at last.
The following is a timeline of Solar System astronomy and science. It includes the advances in the knowledge of the Earth at planetary scale, as part of it.
A transit of Mercury across the Sun takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet. During a transit, Mercury appears as a tiny black dot moving across the Sun as the planet obscures a small portion of the solar disk. Because of orbital alignments, transits viewed from Earth occur in May or November. The last four such transits occurred on May 7, 2003; November 8, 2006; May 9, 2016; and November 11, 2019. The next will occur on November 13, 2032. A typical transit lasts several hours. Mercury transits are much more frequent than transits of Venus, with about 13 or 14 per century, primarily because Mercury is closer to the Sun and orbits it more rapidly.
The 2012 transit of Venus, when the planet Venus appeared as a small, dark spot passing across the face of the Sun, began at 22:09 UTC on 5 June 2012, and finished at 04:49 UTC on 6 June. Depending on the position of the observer, the exact times varied by up to ±7 minutes. Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable celestial phenomena and occur in pairs. Consecutive transits per pair are spaced 8 years apart, and consecutive pairs occur more than a century apart: The previous transit of Venus took place on 8 June 2004 ; the next pair of transits will occur on 10–11 December 2117 and December 2125 within the 22nd century.
The phases of Venus are the variations of lighting seen on the planet's surface, similar to lunar phases. The first recorded observations of them are thought to have been telescopic observations by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Although the extreme crescent phase of Venus has since been observed with the naked eye, there are no indisputable historical pre-telescopic records of it being described or known.
William Crabtree was an English astronomer, mathematician, and merchant from Broughton, then in the Hundred of Salford, Lancashire, England. He was one of only two people to observe and record the first predicted transit of Venus in 1639.
Observations of the planet Venus include those in antiquity, telescopic observations, and from visiting spacecraft. Spacecraft have performed various flybys, orbits, and landings on Venus, including balloon probes that floated in the atmosphere of Venus. Study of the planet is aided by its relatively close proximity to the Earth, compared to other planets, but the surface of Venus is obscured by an atmosphere opaque to visible light.
Neith is a hypothetical natural satellite of Venus reportedly sighted by Giovanni Cassini in 1672 and by several other astronomers in following years. It was 'observed' up to 30 times by astronomers until 1770, when there were no new sightings and it was not found during the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769.
Thomas Hornsby was a British astronomer and mathematician.
Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth's "cosmic neighborhood". This includes the Sun, Earth and the Moon, the major planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, their satellites, as well as smaller bodies including comets, asteroids, and dust.
Jeremiah Horrocks, sometimes given as Jeremiah Horrox, was an English astronomer. He was the first person to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit; and he was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639, an event which he and his friend William Crabtree were the only two people to observe and record. Most remarkably, Horrocks correctly asserted that Jupiter was accelerating in its orbit while Saturn was slowing and interpreted this as due to mutual gravitational interaction, thereby demonstrating that gravity's actions were not limited to the Earth, Sun, and Moon.
Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche was a French astronomer, best known for his observations of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769.
The history of Mars observation is about the recorded history of observation of the planet Mars. Some of the early records of Mars' observation date back to the era of the ancient Egyptian astronomers in the 2nd millennium BCE. Chinese records about the motions of Mars appeared before the founding of the Zhou dynasty. Detailed observations of the position of Mars were made by Babylonian astronomers who developed arithmetic techniques to predict the future position of the planet. The ancient Greek philosophers and Hellenistic astronomers developed a geocentric model to explain the planet's motions. Measurements of Mars' angular diameter can be found in ancient Greek and Indian texts. In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model for the Solar System in which the planets follow circular orbits about the Sun. This was revised by Johannes Kepler, yielding an elliptic orbit for Mars that more accurately fitted the observational data.
On 3 June 1769, navigator Captain James Cook, naturalist Joseph Banks, astronomer Charles Green and naturalist Daniel Solander recorded the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti during Cook's first voyage around the world. During a transit, Venus appears as a small black disc travelling across the Sun. Transits of Venus occur in a pattern that repeats itself every 243 years, with two transits that are eight years apart, separated by breaks of 121.5 and 105.5 years. These men, along with a crew of scientists, were commissioned by the Royal Society of London for the primary purpose of viewing the transit of Venus. Not only would their findings help expand scientific knowledge, it would help with navigation by accurately calculating the observer's longitude. At this time, longitude was difficult to determine and not always precise. A "secret" mission that followed the transit included the exploration of the South Pacific to find the legendary Terra Australis Incognita or "unknown land of the South."
The first known observations and recording of a transit of Venus were made in 1639 by the English astronomers Jeremiah Horrocks and his friend and correspondent William Crabtree. The pair made their observations independently on 4 December that year ; Horrocks from Carr House, then in the village of Much Hoole, Lancashire, and Crabtree from his home in Broughton, near Manchester.
The 1874 transit of Venus, which took place on 9 December 1874, was the first of the pair of transits of Venus that took place in the 19th century, with the second transit occurring eight years later in 1882. The previous pair of transits had taken place in 1761 and 1769, and the next pair would not take place until 2004 and 2012. As with previous transits, the 1874 transit would provide an opportunity for improved measurements and observations. Numerous expeditions were planned and sent out to observe the transit from locations around the globe, with several countries setting up official committees to organise the planning.
Venus has an orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.723 au, and an eccentricity of 0.007. The low eccentricity and comparatively small size of its orbit give Venus the least range in distance between perihelion and aphelion of the planets: 1.46 million km. The planet orbits the Sun once every 225 days and travels 4.54 au in doing so, giving an average orbital speed of 35 km/s (78,000 mph).
The Kirkhill Astronomical Pillar was constructed in 1776 by David Stewart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan and erected in the grounds of his estate at Kirkhill House, near Broxburn, Scotland. The pillar fell into disrepair and eventually collapsed in the 1970s but fortunately the stones were preserved and the pillar was reconstructed (1988) in Almondell Country Park on land once owned by the Erskine family. The pillar records the details of an adjacent scale model of the Solar System constructed by Erskine following the measurements of the size of the Solar System deduced from the observations of the Transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. The model, centred on a Sun of stone six feet in diameter with planets at distances and sizes to scale, has long since disappeared; only the pillar remains.
point venus cook.