Around 13 times per century, Mercury passes between Earth and the sun in a rare astronomical event known as a planetary transit. The 2016 Mercury transit occurred on May 9, between roughly 7:12 am and 2:42 pm EDT.
The rare event was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, and really puts the colossal size of our sun in perspective. Some food for thought:
The Sun is 864,400 miles (1,391,000 kilometers) across. This is about 109 times the diameter of Earth. The Sun weighs about 333,000 times as much as Earth. It is so large that about 1,300,000 planet Earths can fit inside of it. [source]
