“It doesn’t exist and it makes astrophysicists scream!”

You have certainly heard in recent days about an alignment of six planets to be observed in the sky. But Simon Nicolas, director of the Ludiver planetarium in Manche, immediately sets the record straight. An alignment of the planets is simply impossible. Decryption.

According to some media, “this is the space event of the beginning of this year 2025”. We can also read that the alignment of these six planets is observable from Earth on Tuesday January 21, 2025 for several days.

Nay! An alignment of the planets of the solar system is impossible! “They revolve around a star, a sun, like all planets, and follow their elliptical trajectories, in their orbits. They cannot be aligned, it does not exist, this makes astrophysicists scream “laments Simon Nicolas, director of the Ludiver planetarium in Manche.

“Basically, it’s like drawing the planets of the solar system on a sheet of paper and looking at the edge of the paper and saying ‘oh, they’re aligned’!”image Simon Nicolas. But in fact, they are not aligned, it’s just an optical effect.

But then why is everyone talking about an alignment? Quite simply because the planets that make up our solar system move. And it happens that some are visible at the same time, in the sky of the inhabitants of the Earth. “But it happens from time to time, it’s not that rare,” underlines Simon Nicolas.

And right now, the four brightest – Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – are visible to the naked eye. The two most distant, Uranus and Neptune, are also observable but with a telescope.

“It’s not magic, it’s not a coincidence”, continues Simon Nicolas, glaring at the astrologers who are taking advantage of this period to pull incredible horoscopes out of their hats on social networks.

But if astrology is not scientific, the stars are still magical to observe, so let’s not deprive ourselves of it (if there are not too many clouds in the Norman sky)!