Venus crosses the Sun Venus made its transit across
the Sun on 5–6 June, watched eagerly by professional and amateur
astronomers, as well as by millions of people following it on live
webcasts. The rare event occurs twice in close succession roughly every
120 years; the last transit was in 2004 and the next one will not be
until 2117. Scientists hoped to get a once-in-a-lifetime snapshot of the
climate of the entire planet (rather than the time- and space-limited
atmospheric snapshots taken by the Venus Express probe), and to use the
transit to check the way we measure exoplanets circling distant stars.
See go.nature.com/yhpiqu for more.
