ASTRONOMERS are relishing a once-in-a-lifetime lineup of five planets whose last conjunction sparked terrified warnings that all civilisation on Earth would be wiped out.
Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, the only planets visible to the naked eye, are now clustered in a exceptionally narrow section of the sky, providing a brief, beautiful spectacle that will next occur a whole generation from now.
”It’s one of the rare opportunities to see all five planets in the sky at one time,” said Robert Massey, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.
”You can see them after sunset in the western sky. The northern hemisphere is best placed to see the whole thing. In the southern hemisphere, Mercury is likely to be very close to the skyline and so you may not see it.”
The last time this celestial configuration happened was in April-May 2000, but it was not visible from Earth because the Sun’s glare blotted it out.
This year’s event is exceptional because the lineup is so compact and visible. The next cluster will be in September 2040, July 2060 and November 2100.
However, the 2040 and 2100 alignments will be less spectacular because some of the planets will be barely above the horizon as darkness falls, which means they will probably only be visible through binoculars, the website space.com says.
This year’s show continues until May 24. All five planets, from Sun-scorched Mercury to Saturn, the Lord of the Rings, are inching across the sky for a remarkable climax on May 14, when they will rendezvous with a skinny crescent Moon in an arc of just 33 degrees.
The sight has ”pretty small” significance for science, although it has been eagerly awaited by amateur stargazers for its aesthetic beauty, says Massey.
Astrologers and pseudo-scientists have latched onto previous events of this kind as signs of impending doom, such as famines, floods and earthquakes, or auspicious moments for affairs of state.
The 2000 configuration saw the five planets plus the Sun and Moon in an arc of just 26 degrees on May 5 that year.
That sparked a rash of ”5/5/00” books and websites that predicted the combined gravitational pull would cause the Earth’s axis to tilt, unleashing trillions of tons of Antarctic ice and water that would sweep over the planet and swamp all civilisation.
Stonehenge, UFOs, the CIA, the Freemasons, the Turin Shroud and an encrypted warning buried in the Pyramids were all brought in to buttress the prediction. Nothing, of course, happened, because planetary alignments ? or groupings, as many astronomers prefer to call it — never generate sufficient gravitational force to affect life on Earth in any significant way.
There have been around 45-million configurations of this kind in the history of the Earth. None has caused any catastrophe, although the burst of interest has often been a spur for knowledge. The first known calendar is believed to have been inspired by a spectacular grouping almost 4 000 years ago, when Chinese astrologers took the conjunction of the planets as a good token for the country’s first royal dynasty.
Floods, earthquakes and other catastrophes were predicted for February 1524, but nothing special happened. A similar scare in 1774 inspired a Dutch amateur astronomer, Eise Eisinga, to build a nifty hand-cranked model of the Solar System to show the true movements of the planets. ? Sapa