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In astronomy, planetary transits and occultations occur when a planet passes in front of another object, as seen by an observer.The occulted object may be a distant star, but in rare cases it may be another planet, in which case the event is called a mutual planetary occultation or mutual planetary transit, depending on the relative apparent diameters of the objects.
The planet is located in the globular star cluster M4, about 5,600 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. This is one of only a few planets known to orbit around a stellar binary; one of the stars in the binary is a pulsar and the other is a white dwarf. The planet has a mass twice that of Jupiter, and is estimated to be 12.7 ...
Astronomical transit. Phobos transits the Sun, as viewed by the Perseverance rover on 2 April 2022. In astronomy, a transit (or astronomical transit) is the passage of a celestial body directly between a larger body and the observer. As viewed from a particular vantage point, the transiting body appears to move across the face of the larger ...
An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first possible evidence of an exoplanet was noted in 1917 but was not then recognized as such. The first confirmation of the detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, first detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003.
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 first known planet to be discovered with the transit method was OGLE-TR-56b. The first planetary transit observed (by already known exoplanet) was caused by HD 209458 b. The most massive transiting exoplanet is KELT-1b which masses 27.23 M J (making it a brown dwarf) while the least massive is Kepler-42d which masses less than 0.003 M J or ...
Transit-timing variation is a method for detecting exoplanets by observing variations in the timing of a transit. This provides an extremely sensitive method capable of detecting additional planets in the system with masses potentially as small as that of Earth. In tightly packed planetary systems, the gravitational pull of the planets among ...
Historically, transits of Venus were important, because they allowed astronomers to determine the size of the astronomical unit, and hence the size of the Solar System as shown by Jeremiah Horrocks in 1639 with the first known observation of a Venus transit (after history's first observed planetary transit in 1631, of Mercury). [185]