Do the Planets Ever Actually Align?

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. Life on Earth will likely look very different by the next time you can see any sort of planetary alignment in the night sky, even if you're only waiting for five or six planets to appear in a remotely straight line.

Due to the different orbits of the planets in our solar system, it's actually impossible for them all to come into anything that might resemble an alignment from our perspective on Earth. Though we're often taught that the solar system is a flat plane where all of the planets orbit on the exact same level, each planet has its own unique orbit within the ecliptic, an imaginary line in the sky that marks the path of the sun. Mercury has the most deviation, within 7 degrees of the ecliptic, but the other planets vary around 3 degrees from perfectly flat.

That certainly doesn't include the other objects in the solar system either. Former planet Pluto has a 17-degree deviation from the orbital plane of the solar system, and other dwarf planets are even more erratic compared to the eight main planets. While these numbers might not sound very big, it's enough to make planetary alignment pretty much impossible from our perspective on planet Earth, the "third rock from the sun."

If you instead try to imagine the eight major planets in a single line stretching out from the sun (and within 1 degree of each other), it's estimated this occurs roughly every 13.4 trillion years. For context, our solar system is 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is only 13.7 billion years old. So this alignment has likely never happened — and will never happen, as the sun is expected to expand to become a red giant in roughly 5 billion years, wiping out Mercury and Venus for sure — and be dangerously close to Earth.

Staying focused on the eight main planets, it's also uncommon for all eight planets to even be in the same part of the sky; this occurs every few thousand years and was last recorded in 949 C.E. Astronomers predict the next planetary alignment will occur will be on the night of May 6, 2492.

When you focus on just the visible planets — that's Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — even seeing those five neighbors in the same part of the night sky isn't an every night occurrence.

However, in an extremely rare astronomical occurrence, five planets put on a planetary parade and shared the sky March 27, 2023, as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus aligned on the western horizon line in an arc along with the crescent moon after sunset. This large planetary alignment was especially rare because it included one of the outer planets, Uranus, the seventh planet of the solar system and one of the most difficult to spot from Earth.

Venus and Jupiter are the most visible planets, so they could be seen with the naked eye during this last five-planet alignment, while Mars, Mercury and Uranus could be seen with the help of binoculars or a telescope, though visibility may have been affected by significant light pollution, depending upon your location (and given that light pollution impacts at least 80 percent of Earth's population, your visual was probably suboptimal).