Alignment of SEVEN Planets

A very rare treat is about to grace Earth's night skies.

On the evening of 28 February 2025, all seven of the other planets in the Solar System will appear in the night sky at the same time, with Saturn, Mercury, Neptune, Venus, Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars all lining up in a neat row – a magnificent sky feast for the eyes known as a great planetary alignment.

But that's not all. Between now and then, on 21 January 2025, six of the seven other planets will appear in the sky at once in a large alignment – Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Venus, and Saturn, with the exception of Mercury.

An illustration of the upcoming January planetary alignment as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. (Star Walk)

Actually, it's not uncommon for a few planets to be on the same side of the Sun at the same time, but it's less common for most, or even all of the planets to align.

Any number of planets from three to eight constitutes an alignment. Five or six planets assembling is known as a large alignment, with five-planet alignments significantly more frequent than six.

Seven-planet great alignments are, of course, the rarest of all.     READ MORE...

Tiny Earth Light Years Away

The nearest single star to the Solar System has just yielded up a rare and wonderful treasure.

Around a red dwarf known as Barnard's star, which lies just 5.96 light-years away, astronomers have found evidence of an exoplanet.


And not just any exoplanet. This fascinating world, known as Barnard b, is tiny, clocking in with a minimum mass of 37 percent of the mass of Earth. That's a little shy of half a Venus, and about 3.5 Marses.


The reason it's so marvelous is that tiny exoplanets are really, really hard to find. Although Barnard b is not habitable to life as we know it, its discovery is leading us closer to the identification of Earth-sized worlds that may be scattered elsewhere throughout the galaxy.  READ MORE...