Have all 8 planets ever aligned? (2024)

FAQs

Have all 8 planets ever aligned? ›

Lining up more planets takes time. According to Meeus, "all eight planets will line up within 3.6 degrees, for example, every 396 billion years," Barkhouse said. "Which means it has never occurred and will not occur, since the sun will transform into a white dwarf in roughly 6 billion years from now.

Is an 8-Planet Alignment Possible? While there are certainly headlines about it from time to time, full planetary alignment is actually virtually impossible, and even seeing all the planets on the same side of the sun in the sky is incredibly uncommon.

They will never line up exactly, unless there is some very fine tuning, but they can all be within a certain angle. We can estimate how often Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will be within 1 degree of Mercury. This will happen around the time of a “great conjunction”, when Jupiter and Saturn line up, more or less.

The last time all eight planets were aligned was on Dec. 28, 2022.

Even if all the planets found themselves on the same side of the Sun, the orbits of the planets are inclined with respect to each other, so it's impossible for all 8 planets (or 9 if you insist on including Pluto) to form a perfectly straight line. But even if they did — nothing Earth-shattering would happen.

The next planet parade is on April 20, 2024, when five planets – Venus, Mercury, Neptune, Mars, and Saturn – will align in the sky.

Have the planets ever been perfectly aligned? No. The orbits of the planets do no lie in a plane (imaginary plane of the ecliptic). Each planet has an orbit about the sun that has an inclination angle with respect to the average.

In order of distance from the sun they are; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Pluto, which until recently was considered to be the farthest planet, is now classified as a dwarf planet. Additional dwarf planets have been discovered farther from the Sun than Pluto.

So, on average, the three inner planets line up every 39.6 years. The chance that Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will all be within this arc as well on any given pass is 1 in 100 raised to the 5th power, so on average the eight planets line up every 396 billion years.

Pluto Overview

Pluto was long considered our ninth planet, but the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006.

What planets are visible in April 2024? ›

Mars and Saturn lie low in the morning twilight in April 2024. They shine with similar brightness and have a close pairing on the mornings of April 10 and 11. Saturn will climb a bit higher as the month goes on, and Mars will not move as much on the sky's dome.

According to the IAU, Pluto is technically a “dwarf planet,” because it has not “cleared its neighboring region of other objects.” This means that Pluto still has lots of asteroids and other space rocks along its flight path, rather than having absorbed them over time, like the larger planets have done.

This layout of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which occurs about every 175 years, allows a spacecraft on a particular flight path to swing from one planet to the next without the need for large onboard propulsion systems.

The announcement does not mean there is a new planet in our solar system. The existence of this distant world is only theoretical at this point and no direct observation of the object nicknamed "Planet 9" have been made.

Answer and Explanation: When the planets are aligned, we call it planetary alignment. However, it is nothing like folk stories or Hollywood would have you believe. Planetary alignment does not occur when the planets are situated in a straight line; that never occurs.

The chance that Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune will all be within this arc as well on any given pass is 1 in 100 raised to the 5th power, so on average the eight planets line up every 396 billion years.

Even if all the planets lined up "exactly," NASA says nothing significant would happen. What about ocean tides? They would raise an imperceptible "one twenty-fifth of one millimeter." So, it's safe to say your beachfront property will be just fine.

Perhaps the most celebrated recent alignment took place on Dec. 24, 2022, when all eight planets lined up in a horizon-to-horizon arc. This yet again, gave rise to tales of gravitational destruction.