How many planets are aligned

During the three planets' alignment, Jupiter and Mercury will be 0. Although the planets seem like they are close in proximity and we can see them in the Earthly skies, they are actually extremely far away. Mercury is 89 million miles away from Earth, Jupiter is million miles away and Saturn is the furthest at almost a billion miles from Earth. The closest object in proximity to Earth is the moon at , miles away, reports Joe Rao for Space. Mercury will continue to be seen as a bright star until March 20, CNN reports.

Elizabeth Gamillo is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian and a science journalist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Although the planets seem like they are close in proximity and we can see them in the Earthly skies they are millions of miles far away with Saturn being the farthest at billions of miles away.

Depending on how strictly you want to define "alignment", the inner six planets are aligned every fifty to a hundred years or so. While unusual, such alignments have happened in the past without any consequences. The planets are simply too far away to have an effect on anything here on Earth - except our imaginations.

Instead, they swing about on different orbits in three dimensional space. For this reason, they will never be perfectly aligned. It's like waiting for a swarm of flies circling your head to all line up.

It is not going to happen. When astronomers use words like "planetary alignment", they don't mean a literal lining up. They just mean that some of the planets are in the same general region of the sky.

And this type of "alignment" almost never happens to all the planets, but instead happens to two or three planets at one time. Furthermore, "planetary alignment" depends on your viewpoint.

If three planets are in the same region of sky from the earth's point of view, they are not necessarily in the same region of sky form the sun's point of view.

Alignment is therefore an artifact of a viewpoint and not something fundamental about the planets themselves. The book Bad Astronomy by Philip C. Plait states,. However, the planets' orbits don't all exist perfectly in the same plane. They're all tilted a little, so that planets don't all fall exactly along a line in the sky.

Sometimes a planet is a little above the plane, and sometimes a little below For this reason, surprisingly, it's actually rather rare for more than two planets to be near each other in the sky at the same time. Even if the planets did all align in a perfectly straight line, it would have negligible effects on the earth. Fictional and pseudo-science authors like to claim that a planetary alignment would mean that all of the gravitational fields of the planets add together to make something massive that interferes with life on earth.