Florence, 16 June 2024 – Everyone is looking up in the air this evening too in Tuscany. The June sky will put on a show by giving away what has been renamed a super ‘cosmic kiss’ between the Moon and the star Spica, the brightest in the constellation Virgo. This is one of the closest astral conjunctions of the year, and as the experts point out, it can also be observed with the naked eye, although binoculars or even an amateur telescope would be better if you really want to appreciate the details of this conjunction between the Moon and what is the fifteenth brightest star in the sky. A phenomenon that from 9pm, you can admire it until the middle of the night. This is one of the closest astral conjunctions of the year, but what does this cosmic ‘kiss’ consist of? As soon as the sky is dark, the star Spica will emerge and shine so close to the Moon that it will give the observer the impression that these two celestial bodies they are almost touching or ‘colliding’‘. But the summer sky is also about to offer another peculiarity. Who said that only shooting stars exist? They also exist stars that are ‘born’. And the sky will soon have one new star which could light up by the end of the summer. It is called T Coronae Borealis, it is 3,000 light years away and its light turns on periodically, at long intervals that can vary over time. The last time, for example, it appeared in 1946 and before that it had shone in 1866. Astronomers and amateur astronomers are waiting all over the world to see it appear again and it is expected that it could be so bright that everyone will be able to admire it to the naked eye. “It is a star that lives in quiescence, but from time to time displays exceptional brightness – explains astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, scientific director of the Virtual Telescope -. It is therefore a variable star and this recurring phenomenon is actually due to two stars. There are two actors who stage the phenomenon: a cold star and a white dwarf. When the matter of the first is transferred to the second, exceptional luminosity occurs.”
Born today
Giovanni Boccaccio born on 16 June 1313, in Certaldo. Everyone knows him as the author of the ‘Decameron’, but few know that he was commissioned to make a 130 kilometer journey in Dante’s footsteps from Florence to Ravenna. It is the mission he carried out in 1321, twenty-nine years after the death of the Supreme Poet, to deliver ten gold florins to his daughter Beatrice, who had become a nun, as symbolic compensation from the city for the unjust exile suffered by the “fugitive Ghibellin”. . He wrote: “Only poverty is without envy”.
