Well, not quite.
Headlines like the above have become common clickbait over the last few weeks because most of our system’s planets have been visible in the night sky throughout this winter. Enjoying this sight from our terrestrial vantage point, it’s easy to see how one might assume the planets are neatly ordered in a rare fashion. Orbital mechanics can be a little difficult to grasp from such a perspective, however. So let’s step out of the box, or rather step off the sphere that is our Earth.
To start off, a true alignment in space, where multiple bodies are in a nearly straight line with each other, is known as a syzygy, which just happens to be one of my absolute favorite words in the English language. But I digress.
Looking down on our solar system, of course the sun is the gravity monster at the center holding everything together, with all the other stuff is spinning around it. The rocky planets all complete their orbits relatively quickly, from Mercury at 88 days to Mars at 687, and Earth somewhere in the middle at 365 days, 6 hours, and 9 minutes, give or take.
The gas giants are another story. One Jovian (Jupiter) year is equivalent to twelve Earth years, Saturn needs 29.4 years to run a whole lap, Uranus jumps up to 84 years to round off its circuit, and Neptune takes a whopping 165 Earth years to complete one orbit of our star. Neptune was only discovered in 1846, so it just barely celebrated its first-discovery anniversary in 2011. Happy belated birthday, Neptune!
Since these eight planets are moving at various speeds and across such vast distances in space, it’s not every day that they will all be in a perfect line — or syzygy. On average, Mercury, Venus and Earth will line up about every 40 years, but the time increases exponentially for each planet we add to the equation beyond Earth. In the 2001 Angelina Jolie film adaptation of the video game Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the plot centers on a planetary syzygy that will endow the Illuminati with omnipotence via an ancient artifact. Tony Flanders of Sky & Telescope magazine did some math, and calculated an approximate interval of 396 billion years for all eight planets to fall within a 3.6° arc of a true syzygy. For comparison, our solar system is only 4.6 billion years old. Let’s take it a little further. If the planets were within 1° of a perfect alignment, to of course aid the Illuminati in such a valiant endeavor, Tony determined we will be waiting about 13.4 trillion years. That is 1,000 times longer than our entire universe has even existed.
So, no, the planets are not aligned in syzygy. Odds are they will probably never line up in such a fashion during our sun’s expected life of about 10 billion years. They are, however, putting on a fabulous procession across our winter night sky, which you can enjoy just by stepping outside right after sunset, and following the ecliptic across the southern sky.
My deepest condolences to Lara Croft, the Illuminati, and clickbait-article writers everywhere.
If you would like to learn more about the sky, telescopes, or socialize with other amateur astronomers, visit us at prescottastronomyclub.org or Facebook @PrescottAstronomyClub to find the next star party, Star Talk, or event.
Adam England is the owner of Manzanita Financial and moonlights as an amateur astronomer, writer, and interplanetary conquest consultant. Follow his rants and exploits on Twitter @AZSalesman or at Facebook.com/insuredbyadam.
