Jupiter's icy moon Europa will block a distant star on 19 June; watch this special event

Jupiter's icy moon Europa will obscure/block a distant star on 19 June 2022, making the star temporarily disappear. The upcoming event will be visible from certain parts of Africa - Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe - with any size of telescope, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.

The prediction has been made using data from ESA's Gaia mission. The occultation - the process when one celestial object blocks the light of a more distant one - will take place at 03:05:57 UTC. To find the occulted star in the sky, astronomers should look at coordinates RA: 00:23:46.52, Dec: +01:13:18.92.

"What makes the upcoming occultation of Europa special is that this moon will be in Jupiter's shadow at the time and so it is impossible to see Europa directly because it does not generate any light of its own. Instead, it is visible only when it reflects sunlight. As Jupiter will be blocking that sunlight during the occultation, observers will only know Europa is there when it makes the star temporarily disappear," the agency said.

On 19 June, Jupiter’s moon Europa will pass in front of a distant star. This event, predicted by @ESAGaia, helps refine the understanding of the moon's orbit – important for @ESA_JUICE, scheduled to arrive 2031 👉https://t.co/KN6rULdNIH 📸 NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute pic.twitter.com/VtThBAeHA5

— ESA Science (@esascience) June 7, 2022

Operational since late 2013, Gaia, is a star mapping mission to create the most accurate and complete multi-dimensional map of the Milky Way by surveying about 1% of the galaxy's 100 billion stars.

In 2017, Gaia data was used to predict a Europa occultation - a rare event that was captured for the first time by ground-based telescopes. The mission's data were subsequently used to predict further occultations involving all four of Jupiter's largest moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.