Rare 7-Planet Alignment Lights Up the Sky This Week

A Rare Alignment of 7 Planets Will Light Up the Night Sky This Week

A rare astronomical event is about to occur, offering a spectacular view in Earth’s night sky.

On February 28, 2025, all seven planets in our Solar System—Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars—will align in a perfect row, creating a stunning sight called a great planetary alignment.

How Common Are Planetary Alignments?

It’s not unusual for a few planets to be on the same side of the Sun simultaneously, but it’s far less common for most or all planets to line up like this.

Alignments occur when three to eight planets are positioned together. An alignment of five or six planets is considered large, with five-planet alignments being more common than six.

Seven-planet alignments, however, are incredibly rare.

While these alignments aren’t exactly the straight planetary lines shown in diagrams of the Solar System, the planets do appear to line up along an imaginary axis.

This happens because the planets orbit the Sun on a flat plane called the ecliptic. Although some planets’ orbits tilt slightly above or below this plane, most stay aligned on a similar level, much like grooves on a vinyl record, due to the formation process of stars like our Sun.

How Planets Stay in Alignment

When a young star forms in a cloud of gas and dust, it starts to spin. The surrounding material flattens into a disk that feeds into the star’s equator.

Planets form from the leftover material in this disk, and unless disrupted by other gravitational forces, they stay in this plane as they orbit the Sun.

Occasionally, as the planets move through their orbits, they align on the same side of the Sun, allowing us to observe them all together in the sky—something that will happen on the evening of February 28.

How to Watch

The visibility of the planetary alignment, including the timing and order of their rise and set, depends on your location on Earth.

You can use various tools to find out when and where to view the event.

Time and Date offers an interactive tool that lets you select a date and provides rise and set times for each planet, along with their positions in the sky and how easy they’ll be to see.

Stellarium offers a similar tool online that shows the positions of all the planets.

The Sky Tonight app, available for mobile devices, uses your phone’s location to display real-time positions of celestial bodies on a map of the sky above you. There are plenty of other options available as well.

To fully appreciate the planets’ alignment, you’ll likely need binoculars or a telescope, so it’s time to start preparing if you haven’t already. And here’s hoping for clear skies!

Read the original article on: Science Alert

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