The seven planets aligned in the sky next month are what it really means

BBC.com

Six planets – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – are currently visible in the night sky.
The eight major planets of our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same flat plane, and all at different speeds.
From Earth, if the orbits line up just right, we can see multiple planets in our night sky at the same time.
The planets are not exactly lined up, so they will appear in an arc across the sky due to their orbital plane in the Solar System.
This means there are periods where multiple planets in the system align in a straight line, something that doesn’t happen in our Solar System.

POSITIVE

a day ago.

Jonathan O’Callaghan.

When Mercury joins six other planets already visible in the night sky on February 28, stargazers will witness a rare seven-planet alignment. Scientists care about it for the following reasons.

You might be in for a treat if you look up at the sky on a clear night in January or February. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are the six planets that are presently visible in the night sky. Mercury, a rare seven-planet alignment visible in the sky, will join them for a single night in late February.

But these kinds of events are more than just a show for astronomers; they can actually affect our Solar System and provide us with new information about how we fit into it.

Each of the Solar System’s eight major planets orbits the Sun at a different speed, but they all do so in the same flat plane. The closest planet to the Sun, Mercury, completes one orbit in 88 days, which is equivalent to one year for the planet. Naturally, the year on Earth lasts 365 days, but on the other extreme, Neptune takes an astounding 60,190 days, or roughly 165 Earth years, to complete one orbit around our star.

Occasionally, multiple planets can be roughly aligned on the same side of the Sun due to their varying speeds. If the orbits align perfectly, we can see several planets in our night sky simultaneously from Earth. Rarely, all of the planets will align so that they appear together in our night sky along the Sun’s path, known as the ecliptic.

A telescope or binoculars are necessary to see Uranus and Neptune, but Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are all bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.

We can observe this occurrence in January and February. The planets’ orbital plane in the Solar System causes them to appear in an arc across the sky because they are not precisely aligned. All of the planets, with the exception of Mercury, will be visible on clear nights in January and February; this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as a planetary parade. Nevertheless, if the weather holds, all seven planets will be visible on February 28. This will be an amazing sight for onlookers.

“Observing the planets firsthand has a unique quality,” says Jenifer Millard, an astronomer and science communicator at Fifth Star Labs in the United Kingdom. Indeed, if you want a more breathtaking view of all these planets, you can visit Google. However, the photons that are visible to you have traveled millions or billions of miles across space to reach your retinas. “.

Though they are interesting to watch, are these alignments useful for improving our knowledge of our Solar System and beyond, or do they have any effect on our planet?

The fact that they are in this orbital position is merely a coincidence, according to Millard. While some scientists have proposed that planetary alignments could have an impact on Earth, the majority of these claims have little to no scientific support.

However, in 2019, scientists proposed that solar activity might be affected by planetary alignments. What causes the Sun’s 11-year cycle between periods of weakest activity, known as solar minimum, and periods of peak activity, known as solar maximum, which we are currently experiencing, is one of the primary unanswered questions about the Sun. According to physicist Frank Stefani of the Helmholtz-Zentrum research center in Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany, the Earth, Jupiter, and Venus’s combined tidal forces may hold the key.

According to Stefani, even though each planet’s tidal pull on the Sun is minuscule, when two or more of them align with the Sun, creating a syzygy, they may work together to create Rossby waves, which are tiny rotations inside the star that can influence weather patterns.

“Cyclones and anticyclones are caused by Rossby waves on Earth,” Stefani explains. The Sun’s Rossby waves are identical to ours. Stefani’s calculations revealed that the alignment of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter would result in a periodicity of 11:07 years in solar activity, which is nearly identical to the duration of solar cycles that we observe.

Some people are not entirely convinced by the concept, pointing out that processes within the Sun alone can already account for solar activity. “The observational evidence suggests that the planets directly causing the solar cycle just doesn’t happen,” according to a 2022 paper on the topic written by Robert Cameron, a solar scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System research to be exact. “There is no indication that there was any synchronization. “.

However, there are other, much less controversial, peculiarities of planetary alignments that undoubtedly affect us: their value for scientific observations, especially when it comes to studying the Solar System.

Travel time can be significantly decreased by slingshotting a spacecraft outwards using the gravitational pull of a strategically placed planet, like Jupiter.

The outer planets are billions of miles away, and it would take decades to get there with a spacecraft, making it challenging. But no spacecraft has done so more effectively than NASA’s Voyager vehicles: utilizing the gravitational pull of a strategically placed planet, like Jupiter, to propel a spacecraft outwards can drastically cut down on travel time.

Gary Flandro, a NASA scientist, estimated in 1966 that the four outermost planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—would align in 1977, allowing for visits to all four in 12 years as opposed to 30 years if they were not aligned. NASA launched the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft on a “Grand Tour” of the outer Solar System in 1977 as a result of this fortunate alignment, which only happens once every 175 years…

Voyager 1 avoided Uranus and Neptune in favor of passing Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980, respectively, because scientists wanted to fly past Titan, Saturn’s intriguing moon, but were unable to do so without destroying the slingshot effect.

However, in 1986 and 1989, respectively, Voyager 2 became the only spacecraft in history to visit Uranus and Neptune, using the alignment to visit all four planets.

The Voyager science team member Fran Bagenal, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the United States, says, “That worked out fantastic.”. “Voyager 2 would not have reached Neptune until 2010 if it had departed in 1980. It probably wouldn’t have gained any support. Who will provide the funding for such a project?

Planet alignments are helpful not only in our Solar System. The discovery and study of exoplanets—worlds that orbit stars other than the Sun—is one of the many ways that astronomers use alignments to investigate the universe.

When an exoplanet passes in front of a star from our perspective, it dims the star’s light, making it possible to determine the star’s size and orbit. This is the transit method, which is the most common way to find such worlds.

This technique has helped us find a lot of planets orbiting specific stars. According to our perspective, seven planets the size of Earth orbit the red dwarf star Trappist-1, which is 40 light-years away. Since the planets in that system are actually in resonance with one another, the outermost planet completes two orbits for every three inward orbits of the next planet, followed by four, six, and so forth. This indicates that, unlike in our Solar System, there are times when several of the planets in the system align in a straight line.

We can investigate the presence of atmospheres on planets such as these by using transits. According to astronomer Jessie Christiansen of the California Institute of Technology’s Nasa Exoplanet Science Institute, “if a planet with an atmosphere passes in front of a star, that alignment means the starlight goes through the planet, and the molecules and atoms in the planet’s atmosphere absorb light at certain wavelengths.”.

We can explore the far-off Universe through much larger alignments, such as those of galaxies. Because they are so distant and faint, galaxies in the very early universe are challenging to observe. Gravitational lensing is the process by which a large galaxy or cluster of galaxies can magnify the light of a much more distant early galaxy if it passes between our line of sight. This allows us to observe and study the more distant object.

Christiansen says, “These are huge alignments across the scale of the universe.”. Telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope use them to view far-off stars and galaxies like Earendel, which is the furthest star from Earth. Only gravitational lensing allowed the telescope to see the light from the star, which originated in the first billion years of the universe’s 13.7 billion-year history.

Furthermore, in solar systems where the exoplanets pass in front of one another from our perspective, alignments can be used in some new ways, such as to investigate the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Nick Tusay, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University in the United States, used these alignments in 2024 to search for any spillover communications between the Trappist-1 system’s worlds. For example, we send signals to planets like Mars in our solar system to communicate with rovers and spacecraft, just like we do on Earth. “Any time that two planets are aligned might be interesting,” Tusay says.

This time, the searches yielded no results. However, a civilization from another planet that is oriented toward our own Solar System might employ comparable alignments for the same objective. Even though the planetary parade this month is dependent on your perspective—any two planets in our system can line up if you stand at the proper angle—it’s still possible to picture someone else watching from the other end.

Tusay says that another alien civilization might view this as a chance to carry out their own research.

–.

.

scroll to top