In addition, the five planets Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury will be in the same general part of the sky on September 8, 2040. On average, the three inner planets line up every 39.6 years. Even the dark dwarf planet Pluto offered cloud watchers favorable conditions to observe it due to its resistance. It’s like waiting for a flock of flies to circle your head to reach all rows.
Just go outside and look up, and depending on local weather and light conditions, you should be able to see Mars.
How often do the 7 planets align?
If you look at a two-dimensional representation of the planets and their orbits on a piece of paper, you might think that all planets will eventually orbit along the same line. About every 100 years or so, six or more planets line up and appear together in a small area of the sky. When planets line up on one side of the Sun, they are not necessarily in the same region of the sky for observers from Earth. The probability that Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are also within this arc at a given pass is 1 in 100, raised to the fifth power, so that the eight planets line up on average every 396 billion years.
When was the last time all the planets were lined up?
There have been many ridiculous claims over the years about planet alignment—such as that they cause earthquakes or that they allow people on Earth to be weightless for a short time. The apps’ notifications help you stay up to date on the most notable astronomical events in a timely manner. For this reason, it is surprisingly rare that more than two planets are close to each other in the sky at the same time. At the beginning of the month, the elusive planet Mercury shone in the morning sky, and brilliant Venus was sitting nearby.
Note that the distance between them is constantly changing as the planets orbit the Sun on different paths at different speeds.
