In a year of spectacular astronomical events, five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn —aligned with a crescent moon on June 24, 2022.
Key highlights
- The last time these planets aligned like this was almost 20 years ago, in 2004, and it won’t happen again until 2040.
- The planets appeared “like a string of pearls spread out from close to the horizon”.
- The alignment was rare because the planets all have different orbits of the sun.
- Mercury, as the closest planet to the sun, orbits the Sun in the shortest time at just 88 days.
- Mercury is followed by Venus, which takes about 225 days.
- The Earth takes an average of 365 days and Mars takes 687 days.
- Jupiter takes 12 years and Saturn takes 29 years to orbit the sun.
- The planets appeared in order of their distance from the Sun, from left to right: that means starting with Mercury (an average of 58 million kilometers or 36 million miles from the Sun) and ending with Saturn (an average of 1.4 billion kilometers or 886 million miles from the Sun).
- They are all orbiting at different speeds. And they rotate at different speeds and their orbits have slightly different shapes as well. All that makes it hard to get them lined up at the same time.
- Even rarer are eight-planet alignments. Some research suggests eight-planet alignments happen roughly every 170 years, but that depends on definition of a “perfect alignment” and some of it hasn’t happened for 1,000 years.
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