Saturn, the ringed planet that is the second-largest world in the solar system, briefly disappeared on January 4th in a special cosmic event. The moon briefly covered a huge planet and this event was captured using the Virtual Telescope project by Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi, writes Space.

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When a celestial body, such as the Moon, covers the planets of the solar system or stars, this astronomical phenomenon is called an occultation. Most often, astronomers observe the occultation of other objects by the Moon.. In this case, the Moon is much larger in the sky than a more distant object, in this case the planet Saturn.

Gianluca Masi took a multi-photograph of the Moon's occultation of Saturn, showing the event from start to finish.. The photograph shows how the moon moves and for how long Saturn disappears behind its part not illuminated by the Sun, and then appears from behind the illuminated side of the Earth's satellite.

When the Moon covered Saturn, the planet's magnitude was +0.9, and thus the gas giant could be seen even with the naked eye. As for the Moon, during the occultation it was illuminated by the light of the Sun by approximately 30%.

The image also shows some of the Moon's impressive large craters and if you look closely you can even see the rings of Saturn.

The Moon looks so huge in the photo because it is much closer to Earth (at an average distance of 385,000 km, as it moves closer and further away) than the sixth planet from the Sun. At the same time, Saturn looks like a small spot, because the planet is located on average at a distance of 1.4 billion km from us (the gas giant has an elongated orbit and also either approaches or moves away from us).

The next lunar occultation of Saturn will be seen on February 1, and after this, a similar astronomical event will not occur until 2031.

As Focus already wrote, the Hubble Space Telescope captured a photograph of the death of an unusual star that exploded in a rare supernova. A special star exploded 650 million light years away.

Focus also wrote that astronomers discovered the most ancient blazar, which is located at a distance of almost 13 billion light years from us. This is a very active supermassive black hole that releases powerful radiation towards our planet..