A planetary alignment on January 25, 2025?
If you’re on social media, by now you might have seen the breathless announcements of a planetary alignment on January 25, 2025. A flurry of videos and memes is claiming that all eight planets will be
in a line on one side of the sun and visible in our nighttime sky. Is it true? Nope. Why January 25? We have no idea. But there have been – and still are –
six planets in our evening sky throughout January. And yes, they’re in a line from our point of view …
like always.
So, no, there won’t be a planetary alignment with everything neatly stacked on one side of the sun. But there will be lots of planets for observing in the nighttime sky! Not just on January 25 but throughout January and early February.
Why the planets are always ‘in a line’
The planets in our solar system orbit our sun more or less in a flat plane. The Earth-sun plane – called the
ecliptic – largely defines the plane of the planets and sun. So, in our sky, the planets
always appear somewhere along a line. That line across our sky – the path of the sun and moon – is just a 2-dimensional representation of the 3-dimensional plane of our solar system.
So the planets always travel in a line across our sky. So, if there’s more than one planet up there, it always lines up with any other planet (and the moon and sun).
And in January 2025 there are four bright planets – and two faint planets – in the evening sky. Yup. They’re arrayed in a line across the sky.