Today (June 17), for the first time in 11 years, people across North America will be able to look up in the daytime sky and see Venus temporarily vanish behind the faint crescent moon.

The rare skywatching spectacle can be viewed with the naked eye and recorded without any special equipment, as long as the weather cooperates — however, using a good pair of binoculars or a backyard telescope will make it much easier to see the faint light of Venus in the daytime sky. No matter how you go about skywatching, you must take great care not to stare directly at the sun while doing so.

During the event, known as a lunar occultation, the moon will briefly pass between Earth and Venus, which has been shining especially bright over the past few weeks while hanging out alongside Jupiter in the evening sky. As a result of the occultation, the hellish planet will appear to blink out of existence, before reappearing around an hour later, allowing for two separate skywatching experiences. The last time this happened was on Dec. 7, 2015, and you will not be able to see it again until 2029.

How to see Venus disappear

The occultation will be visible from the 48 contiguous U.S. states, as well as from large parts of Canada and some countries in the northern half of South America — assuming there are clear skies at the time of the event. (The latest forecast suggests that weather conditions will be most favorable along the West Coast.)

As with most skywatching events, such as solar eclipses, not everyone will see it at the same time. For example, people in San Francisco will observe Venus vanish at around 11:34 a.m. PDT, while those in Miami will watch the planet disappear at about 4:06 p.m. EDT (around 92 minutes later when disregarding time zones).

The duration of the occultation will also vary with location. For example, Venus will reappear after around 58 minutes for viewers in San Antonio, but people in Philadelphia will have to wait roughly 80 minutes to see the planet again.

You can see the exact timings for more than 700 locations across the U.S. in a list compiled by the International Occultation Timing Association.

The best place to watch both the disappearance and reappearance of Venus will be from within the shadow of a large tree or building. Blocking out the sun will not only make it easier to see both the moon and Venus but also reduce the risk of sustaining eye damage by looking directly at the sun.

If you are struggling to see the occultation, try using your phone camera to zoom in on the waxing crescent to better locate and record Venus, Spaceweather.com recommends.

What the June 17 lunar occultation will look like

During the event, around 11% of the moon will be faintly visible in the daytime sky, according to Sky & Telescope. Around three-quarters of Venus will be visible — although it will look like a single spot to the naked eye — so the planet will shine much brighter than the moon. The pair will be collectively located around 38 degrees from the sun in the sky.

Venus will vanish behind the side of the moon opposite the illuminated crescent and will take around 30 seconds to disappear completely. It will then reappear above the crescent, similar to the iconic "Earthrise" photos taken by lunar astronauts, such as the Artemis II crew. (The exact spot where Venus disappears and reappears will depend on where you are in the world.)

If you miss this occultation or fancy another skywatching spectacle, be sure to head back outside later the same day, around an hour after sunset, when Venus, Jupiter and Mercury will shine alongside the crescent moon as it passes in front of the Beehive Cluster (also called M44).

Editor's note: Now is the best time to look for Jupiter and Venus in the evening sky, with their closest conjunction occuring on Tuesday (June 9) after sunset. You can see the two bright planets with the naked eye, but a good pair of stargazing binoculars will let you zoom in on both planets at once.

In one of 2026's skywatching highlights, the two brightest planets in the night sky will appear very close to each other for a string of several evenings.

This conjunction of Venus and Jupiter will occur in the western sky during twilight and be easily visible to the naked eye. The best time to look will be from about 45 minutes to two hours after sunset on Tuesday, June 9, though the evenings on either side will offer almost the same view. Find a location with a clear view of the western horizon for the best show.

On June 9, the two worlds will appear to be just 1.6 degrees apart — about three times the width of a full moon. To measure that distance in the night sky, hold up either a single index finger or two pinky fingers side-by-side at arm's length. It's a close enough conjunction to fit comfortably within the field of view of standard binoculars — a rare opportunity for skywatchers.

For all of its beauty, the conjunction is an optical illusion. Jupiter, an outer planet with respect to Earth, will be much farther away. The gas giant will be about six astronomical units (au), or six times the Earth-sun distance, from Earth at the time of the conjunction. Venus, an inner planet, will be just 1.2 au away — five times closer than Jupiter.

What's happening is that Venus is rising while Jupiter is receding in Earth's sky. Sooner or later, they must appear to pass closely in the night sky. To understand why, consider the speeds of the three planets involved — Venus, Earth and Jupiter.

Venus takes 224.7 days to orbit the sun, Earth takes 365.25 days, and Jupiter takes 11.86 years. As can be seen on The Planets Today, Earth is currently racing away from Jupiter, causing it to appear to sink in our evening sky. On July 29, Jupiter will be lost in the glare of the sun. However, the faster-moving Venus is approaching Earth, causing it to rise in our evening sky. Venus will shine brightly as the "Evening Star" all summer, reaching its farthest distance from the sunset in mid-August.

As well as being dramatically closer to Earth, Venus will also be vastly brighter in the sky. During the conjunction, Venus will shine at -3.9 magnitude with Jupiter at -1.7 magnitude (in skywatching, a lesser magnitude corresponds to a brighter object). That makes Venus about 7.5 times brighter than Jupiter as seen from Earth. As well as being closer than Jupiter, Venus reflects significantly more sunlight because of its thick cloud layers.

Although you can see the conjunction with the naked eye, a pair of stargazing binoculars will help you see both planets together, while with a good backyard telescope, you may see some of Jupiter’s four large Galilean moons — Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io — as dots of light in a line on either side of the giant planet. A decent camera will also let you take stunning photos of the conjunction.

The next major planetary conjunction will take place before sunrise on Nov. 15, when Jupiter and Mars will appear just 1.2 degrees from each other.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Monday (June 8) to add context around the event.

Bizarre Venus surface formations (or coronae) are likely key to understanding our twin planet's heretofore inscrutable interior. Using NASA Magellan spacecraft data from decades past, Anna Gulcher, an earth and planetary scientist at Germany's University of Freiburg, have created innovative new 3D models of the largest coronae to better understand Venus' puzzling geodynamics.

The team used data from the Magellan spacecraft's radar sensors, which officially ceased functioning in 1994, to get a closer look at the coronae's surrounding topography and gravitational signatures.

Coronae display extraordinary diversity in size, morphology, topography, gravity signatures, and tectonic setting, indicating that they do not represent a single formation mechanism, but instead reflect a spectrum of dynamic processes, Gulcher and colleagues write in a paper presented at the European Geosciences Union's 2026 General Assembly in Vienna.

The updated database includes 741 coronae which span Venus' surface.

They are huge circles of fracture systems that we think are basically the surface expression of a plume of hot material moving upwards from the interior of the planet, Gulcher told me at EGU26 in Vienna.

Understanding these structures is critical not only for deciphering Venus' geodynamic regime, but also for assessing whether similar processes may have operated on the early Earth, Gulcher and colleagues write in the EGU paper.

By combining gravity and topographic data with geodynamic simulations, the study identifies possible warm mantle upwellings beneath 52 coronae and presents perhaps the strongest evidence that different plume-related tectonic processes occur there, says Gulcher. The work also shows that current gravity data can miss many active tectonic signals, meaning activity on Venus could be more widespread than currently detectable, she says.

As For Why They Are Circular?

We think they are formed by something circular in shape from the interior, says Gulcher. A magma plume, for instance, that is hotter than the surrounding material can cause a lot of uplift of the crust, which creates these rings, she says.

The coronae are thought to have been the result of a lot of mantle convection.

Mantle convection is the movement of the mantle (or rocky layer between the core and crust) of any planet, where it can spread outwards and drive plates to move laterally, says Gulcher. It's the cycle of upward and downward movement of the mantle over a very long time scales, she says.

Planetary scientists still debate whether Venus ever had any geophysical process resembling atmospheric carbon recycling. The most significant would have been full-scale plate tectonics, the theory that ascribes our planet's lithosphere as being divided into giant moving plates. The idea is that such plates frequently collide causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions as well as the continuous recycling of carbon in and out of our atmosphere.

Earth is beyond fortunate for having the unique ability to evolve plate tectonics, which enabled our atmosphere to remain stable over billions of years. Plate tectonics is arguably what differentiates the ability of any given rocky planet to evolve intelligent life.

On Earth, carbon is recycled back into the mantle very efficiently, says Gulcher.

That's in part because large scale water oceans at Earth’s surface created hydrous (or water rich) rocks. Such rocks are prone to become weaker and more pliable much faster than lithospheric rocks on a dry planet like Venus. In fact, Venus may never have had a large water ocean; that's an important conundrum that upcoming missions to Venus' surface hope to solve.

It's now thought that such water oceans are what's needed to create plate boundaries. That's when a planet's lithospheric rocks become much more pliable and thus more prone to break up and separate into separate into movable tectonic plates.

In contrast, without oceans, Venus likely only had very limited carbon recycling via tectonic and resurfacing processes, says Gulcher.

More details should come with future in situ data taken at Venus.

Future missions, such as VERITAS and EnVision, will significantly enhance our ability to analyze coronae with unprecedented detail in surface and subsurface structure, and increased topographic and gravity resolution, Gulcher and colleagues noted in a 2025 paper in the journal JGR Planets.

As For Earth?

Plate tectonics have been stable here on Earth for at least 3 billion years, says Gulcher. This global destruction of material and formation of material allowed our planet to lose a lot of heat and also to recycle material back into the mantle, she says. This continuous cycle allowed our planet to have stable surface conditions over billions of years, says Gulcher.

What haunts Gulcher most about Venus?

We see structures on Venus that are so earthlike yet also show a few very important differences, says Gulcher. With the available data, we don't fully understand how it can look so similar but be so different, she says.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

If you peer at the sky during a cloudless dawn or dusk, you'd immediately spot Venus. Appearing as a brilliant, steadily shining speck, it's the second-brightest object in the night sky after the moon.

"The planet is about 100 times brighter than a first magnitude star," Anthony Mallama, a researcher at the IAU's Centre for Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, told Live Science in an email. First magnitude stars are the brightest stars visible in the night sky. For example, when looking at average brightness, the first magnitude star Sirius is at -1.47, and Venus is at -4.14 (on the scale astronomers use, dimmer objects have a more positive magnitude).

But what makes Venus super-bright? Astronomical research suggests several factors can change how luminous Venus appears from Earth.

Reflective cloud cover

Venus' shininess is largely due to the planet's high albedo, or the amount of light reflected off its surface. Venus has an albedo of 0.76, meaning it scatters about 76% of the sunlight it receives back into space, according to Sanjay Limaye, a distinguished scientist in the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In contrast, a perfect mirror would bounce off 100%, Earth bounces 30% and the moon has a low albedo, reflecting just 7% of the light that hits it.

Venus' high albedo arises from a thick, all-swaddling cloak of clouds. Extending from 30 miles to 43.5 miles (48 to 70 kilometers) above the Venusian surface, these decks of clouds are cushioned between haze layers, and are mostly suspended droplets of sulfuric acid, according to a 2018 review of data from 1970s and 1980s space missions to Venus. Limaye noted that such droplets are tiny, mostly about the size of a bacterium. Together, the droplets and haze layers scatter sunlight extremely efficiently.

But Venus isn't the solar system's shiniest object. Saturn's ice-covered moon Enceladus has a high albedo of around 0.8, a 2010 study noted. From Earth, though, this cosmic object appears much dimmer than Venus. That's because it's much farther from the sun. While Earth's "morning star" is 67 million miles (108 million km) from the sun, Enceladus is at least 13 times as distant. The inverse square law shows that Venus consequently receives 176 times more intense light compared to Enceladus, giving it a significant edge.

Distance from Earth

Being close to Earth also influences Venus' brightness. The average Venus-Earth distance is 105.6 million miles (170 million km). Sometimes, Mercury is the closest planet to Earth at an average distance of 96.6 million miles (155.5 million km), but Venus' larger size (of 7,521 miles (12,104 km) compared to Mercury causes it to look brighter.

But Venus' distance from our planet — and consequently, its apparent luminosity — aren't fixed. At its closest, when Venus lies directly between Earth and the sun, it's a mere 24 million miles (about 38 million km) away, according to NASA. Yet at this point — called the inferior conjunction — it's actually extremely dim, according to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

This arises because the inner planets show moon-like phases when viewed from Earth, Limaye said. At inferior conjunction, Venus' illuminated surface is completely invisible from Earth. In contrast, most of Venus' illuminated surface can be seen only when Earth and Venus are on opposite sides of the sun, a position called the superior conjunction. At this point, though, Venus is at its smallest and is very dim because it is extremely far from Earth.

A rainbow-like phenomenon

Venus is at its brightest when only a crescent-like sliver of its sunlit surface can be seen. Termed the point of greatest brilliancy, this typically occurs a month before and after the inferior conjunction. A 2006 study co-authored by Mallama suggested that, at this phase, Venus' suspended sulfuric acid droplets scatter sunlight toward Earth. "This phenomenon is called a glory and it is in the same family of optical effects that includes rainbows," Mallama explained.

Together, variations in the albedo, its distance from the Earth and sun, and its phases seen from Earth can all cause the brightness of Venus to swing from -4.92 to -2.98, according to a 2018 study. However this is still luminous enough to make Venus viewable most of the year, even from urban areas.

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

Venus, Jupiter and Saturn are easy to see in the night sky, but few skywatchers have ticked Mercury off their planetary bucket list. That may change on Tuesday, Nov. 25, when early risers (or late sleepers) will get a rare chance to see the closest planet to the sun together with its bright neighbor, Venus.

Mercury is notoriously difficult to spot due to its close orbit, which often causes the small planet to be lost in the sun's glare. However, Mercury occasionally makes a brief appearance before sunrise.

A particularly good window for Mercury watching opens on Nov. 25 and continues until around Dec. 25. It begins with a close conjunction, when Mercury will appear just above the brighter Venus in the east-southeast sky. You'll need a clear view of the southeast horizon to see the duo rise together and a pair of good binoculars to see the planets clearly (though be sure to put the binoculars away before sunrise where you are). Mercury appears in binoculars as a faint, steady light.

During the conjunction, Mercury will shine at magnitude -2 and Venus will be at magnitude -3.8, making the "Swift Planet" about five times dimmer than the "Morning Star." (In astronomy, lower magnitudes indicate brighter objects.)

Mercury is visible from Earth only occasionally because of the tiny planet's short, swift orbit; it takes just 88 days to complete one lap of the sun. That's why Mercury almost always appears to be lost in the sun's glare. However, when it moves to the western side of the sun as seen from Earth, it appears in the predawn sky, rising shortly before the sun. This brief morning apparition will occur around Mercury's greatest western elongation on Dec. 7, which will be when it's farthest from the sun from Earth's point of view and thus highest in the predawn sky.

This conjunction has a bigger significance, because as Mercury rises, Venus sinks. Having been bright in evening skies in early 2025, Venus is approaching the end of its bright morning apparition. It's rising later each morning and will soon fade from view as it retreats into the sun's glare.

On Jan. 6, 2026, Venus will pass between Earth and the sun — what astronomers call superior conjunction.In the weeks after, Venus will reemerge in the evening sky and reach peak brightness on Sept. 22, 2026, according to EarthSky.

Editor's note: This story was updated on Nov. 24 to indicate the conjunction is happening overnight tonight.

One of the best naked-eye stargazing sights of the year is on offer to skywatchers this week — if you can rise before the sun Friday (Sept. 19). Just before sunrise, the crescent moon, the brilliant planet Venus and the bright star Regulus (the brightest star in the constellation Leo) will cluster together on the east-northeast horizon.

There will be barely half a degree between each of the three objects, which is less than the width of a little finger held up against the sky. This triple conjunction of naked-eye objects is a rare sight worth trying to see.

Visible low in the eastern sky about 90 minutes before sunrise, the waning crescent moon will be about 6% illuminated. The slender moon itself will be a gorgeous sight, thanks to the bonus "Earthshine" — the sun's light reflecting off Earth back onto the moon to illuminate its dark side. The dazzling sight will be visible both to the naked eye and in simple stargazing binoculars.

Venus and Regulus will be close by, although their exact locations in the sky will depend on your vantage point. For example, on the east coast of North America, stargazers will see an almost perfect alignment of the crescent moon, Venus and Regulus in a straight line covering barely a degree of sky. On the west coast of North America, it will be more of a close clustering, with a vague triangle formed by the moon, Venus and Regulus.

In terms of brightness, there will be a distinct pecking order. The moon will far outshine everything, followed by dazzling Venus and then Regulus, which will appear faint by comparison. In fact, Venus (magnitude -3.8) will be about 110 times brighter than Regulus (magnitude 1.3). (In astronomy, a low or negative magnitude corresponds to a brighter object.)

Those in northeastern Canada, Greenland, Western Europe and North Africa will see an even closer conjunction, with the moon occulting (moving in front of to block) Venus for a short time. According to In-The-Sky.org, the position of these three objects will vary according to the observer's location because the moon will be so close to Earth that its position in the sky will vary by as much as 2 degrees across the world. It also means that lunar occultations are only visible from part of Earth's surface at any given time.

In the days after the close conjunction, the crescent moon will shrink and become an invisible new moon on Sept. 21, causing a partial solar eclipse that will be visible from New Zealand, Antarctica and the western South Pacific. On Sept. 22, the autumn equinox will bring roughly equal day and night to the entire globe, heralding the arrival of longer nights for stargazing in the Northern Hemisphere. Venus will remain as a bright "Morning Star" for the rest of the month.

Who hasn't looked into the sky and wondered if there's life out there, somewhere, looking back at us? Is it possible there's alien life closer to home — within the bounds of our solar system?

The short answer is yes, there are several places researchers are looking for signs of life within our solar system, and there are some hints that life might be hiding in unexpected places.

Is there life on Mars?

While there don't seem to be any "little green men" inhabiting Mars, it's possible there was microbial life in the past. Mars is currently a frigid desert, but thanks to Mars rovers that have studied the planet's rocks, we know that a long time ago, it had liquid water — an important condition for life.

"The Curiosity rover was built to search for habitable environments, the kind that could have supported microbial life on Mars in the past, if life ever arose on the Red Planet," said Amy Williams, a geology professor at the University of Florida and a member of both NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance science teams. "Curiosity's payload was selected to accomplish this task by looking for the conditions that we know life on Earth requires — liquid water, a source of carbon, and chemical energy to power a metabolism," she told Live Science.

In addition to studying the Martian environment, the Perseverance rover has been collecting promising rock samples to be returned to Earth for advanced analysis. The Mars Sample Return mission is currently under development by NASA and ESA to travel to Mars, collect the sample cores, and bring them back to Earth. (The Donald Trump administration has proposed cutting NASA funding to pay for this mission, however.)

"At least one of the cores collected has qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient microbial life," Williams said of a particularly interesting rock sample. "Returning samples to Earth with the Mars Sample Return architecture would enable us to address some of humanity's most profound questions, including whether we are alone in the universe."

Related: How would we give aliens directions to Earth?

Could there be life on Venus?

Even though it's commonly called Earth's "twin," Venus is probably not the first place anyone might look for life in the solar system. Its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, and the average surface pressure is more than 90 times that of Earth. It's wrapped in thick, dense clouds that are mostly made from sulfuric acid, a highly corrosive substance that mixes with water to form acid rain on Earth, damaging flora, fauna and soil.

Despite those hostile conditions, extremophile microbial life might be able to survive high in Venus' atmosphere, where the temperatures and pressures aren't so extreme; perhaps life could find ways to protect itself from sulfuric acid's destructive nature. To find out, MIT is putting together the Morning Star Missions, which will travel to Venus' atmosphere with the ultimate goal of collecting a sample of the planet's clouds and returning it to Earth for better analysis.

"Microbial life might exist in Venus's clouds, despite their composition of concentrated sulfuric acid," Sara Seager, a professor at MIT and the director of the Morning Star Missions, told Live Science. "If we find compelling signs of life on Venus, it would upend our understanding of habitability and prove that life can exist in non-water solvents, opening up the range of worlds where life is possible."

When looking for life, scientists often focus on the search for liquid water because it's a requirement for life on Earth. Finding life on Venus would shatter that limitation — meaning alien life could be a lot stranger than we've thought and there could be a lot more places to look for it.

In 2020, a possible detection of phosphine gas in Venus' clouds became the center of a controversy about signs of life on Venus. Phosphine gas was an unexpected find because most known chemical processes that produce it come from living organisms or from extreme pressures on gas giants. However, the signal was small and critics said it might have been noise in the data. The Morning Star Missions to Venus will give us much more information about the planet's chemistry and possibly confirm if there's phosphine floating in the clouds.

Is there life on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter?

Further out in the solar system, there are several moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter that could potentially host life, particularly Enceladus and Europa.

Saturn's moon Enceladus has a global subsurface ocean hiding underneath a thick icy shell. The moon constantly spits giant plumes of salty water into space that give scientists a rare opportunity to directly sample the interior of a celestial body other than Earth. The Cassini mission performed several flybys of Enceladus from 2005 through 2017, collecting images and even direct samples from the plumes that are still being analyzed. A 2023 paper in Nature announced that scientists had detected phosphates on Enceladus — meaning scientists have now detected all the basic chemical ingredients for life in the moon's ocean.

Several missions to study astrobiology on Enceladus, with the goal of collecting more samples from the plumes, have been in the works by teams at ESA and NASA, although they're still a long way from getting to the launch pad.

Like Enceladus, Jupiter's moon Europa is an icy world with a global subsurface ocean and water plumes erupting from its surface. Jupiter's massive gravitational pull on the moon provides energy and motion that fuels active geologic activity, and is thought to be the main reason the ocean is warm enough to be liquid. Interactions between the salty ocean and the rocky interior could possibly host life similar to the life found around hydrothermal vents on Earth.

ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) launched on April 14, 2023 with an expected arrival at Jupiter in July 2031, where it will study Jupiter and three of its moons: Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. NASA's Europa Clipper mission launched on Oct. 14, 2024 to reach Jupiter in 2030 and conduct flybys of Europa to study if conditions for life are present.

Titan, another of Saturn's moons, is an extremely unique place in the solar system. It has a methane cycle like Earth's water cycle and a thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere. The Cassini mission performed over 50 flybys of Titan from 2004 through 2017 and launched the Huygens probe that landed on the moon's surface in 2005. These two missions collected data that indicated Titan's atmosphere could probably create complex molecules that are building blocks for life. NASA is putting together a car-sized octocopter to fly on Titan and collect samples at different landing sites.

Where else could life be in the solar system?

There are quite a few other places we might find life in the solar system, including dwarf planets like Ceres. Ceres is thought to have a lot of liquid water under an icy and rocky crust, thanks to images taken by NASA's Dawn mission which visited it in 2015.

The more we explore the solar system, the more places we find that have conditions that could support life. If there is life out there, it's likely not advanced enough to reach out to us, so we'll have to be the first to say hello.

Extraterrestrials quiz: Are you an alien expert, or has your brain been abducted?

Six planets — Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — will appear in a dark night sky together for almost a week, beginning Sunday, Aug. 17. The fairly rare "planetary parade," which is sometimes mistakenly called a planetary alignment, will continue through Wednesday, Aug. 20.

The celestial gathering, last seen in February, will appear in the eastern sky about an hour before sunrise. Although most of these planets have been visible in the morning sky for weeks, Mercury will join the fray, bringing the planet count from five to six.

Under clear skies, you should be able to spot Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Mercury will be closer to the horizon but still bright enough to be seen by most observers. However, Uranus (appearing between Jupiter and Saturn in the sky) and Neptune (close to Saturn in the sky) are too dim and distant to be seen with the naked eye. The only way to see these two ice giants is by using a good telescope.

Although it's relatively rare for six planets to appear in the sky simultaneously, the beauty of the view will be vastly increased by the waning crescent moon.

Related: How to photograph the moon: Tips on camera gear, settings and composition

On Aug. 17 and Aug. 18, a crescent moon will rise above Jupiter and Venus. The two brightest planets in the night sky are now slowly moving apart after an incredibly close conjunction on Aug. 12.

Mercury may be visible below Jupiter and Venus, but it will be easier to see it on Aug. 19. On that morning, and on Aug. 20, a slim crescent moon will be very close to Jupiter and Venus — a visual highlight of the "planetary parade."

By around Aug. 21, Mercury will begin to fall back into the sun's glare and will become more difficult to see.

According to the Star Walk app, there will be two six-planet parades in 2026: one after sunset in February and another before sunrise in August.

Just as the Perseid meteor shower approaches its peak, two luminous planets are getting in on the night-sky action.

Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets in the sky, will meet in a conjunction very early tomorrow morning (Aug. 12). On this morning, the two planets will be less than a degree apart — approximately the length of your pinkie when held up to the sky at arm's length. Because they'll appear close together, you'll be able to view both simultaneously through skywatching binoculars or a backyard telescope.

If you want to see the conjunction, you'll have to either stay out late or get up early: Venus and Jupiter rise together around 3 a.m. local time and set together around 6 a.m. local time. However, these times vary slightly depending on your exact location. You can use Time and Date to check the precise rise and set times for your area.

Venus and Jupiter will rise in the east with the constellation Gemini and will ascend to about 20 degrees above the horizon before sunrise. Because they're fairly low on the horizon, you'll want to observe them in a mostly flat area without many trees, buildings or other obstructions to the east.

You can easily find Venus and Jupiter with the naked eye thanks to their exceptional brightness. Venus is the second-brightest object in the night sky, after the moon, followed by Jupiter. However, seeing these planets with a decent backyard telescope or pair of binoculars is a treat you won't want to miss.

Jupiter and Venus skywatching

If you look through a backyard telescope or pair of skywatching binoculars, you'll see Jupiter's cloud bands and maybe even its famed Great Red Spot. The Red Spot, a giant storm in Jupiter's cloud bands that spans twice the width of Earth, faces our planet about once every 10 hours when Jupiter completes a rotation.

Related: How to photograph the moon: Tips on camera gear, settings and composition

Jupiter's Red Spot is most visible when it crosses Jupiter's meridian, the imaginary line between its north and south poles. You can use this tool from Sky & Telescope to see the Red Spot's transit times — the times it crosses the meridian.

Skywatching equipment also reveals hidden wonders on Venus, such as its phases. Like the moon, Venus goes through phases — new, crescent, quarter, gibbous and full— because of its position relative to Earth and the sun.

But unlike the moon's phases, Venus' phases are visible only through skywatching equipment. And while the moon completes all of its phases in less than a month, it takes Venus 584 days.

The moon will somewhat disrupt viewing conditions for this event. The planets are best viewed under dark, moonless skies. However, the moon on conjunction night will be a waning gibbous, about 90% to 95% illuminated after the peak of the full Sturgeon Moon, and will rise around 9:30 p.m. and set around 10 a.m. local time.

Fortunately, though, Jupiter and Venus are bright enough to avoid being totally washed out by moonlight. The moon will also be far to the west while Venus and Jupiter rise in the east, so you can view this conjunction away from the bright face of the moon. For an even better viewing experience, try to observe this conjunction from a location where the moon is obscured by trees or other obstacles that block its glare.

And if you miss this conjunction, don't worry — Venus and Jupiter will remain close together for the next couple of nights, although they will slowly drift apart as August comes to a close.

Editor's note: This story was updated on Aug. 11 with up-to-date information about the conjunction

Four of the solar system's terrestrial planets, including Earth and a long-lost world, likely started life waltzing around the sun to a fixed rhythm, according to a new study. The findings also suggest that those planets formed earlier than previously thought.

Astronomers have been increasingly interested in how planetary systems change their internal architecture on cosmic timescales, motivated by several recent exoplanet family discoveries, like the seven-planet cohort orbiting the tiny star TRAPPIST-1.

Past research has found that one early stage in a planetary family's metamorphosis involves pairs, triplets or entire systems moving in a rhythmic beat — called resonance — around their parent star. Planets in resonance have orbital periods that form a whole-number ratio. In the TRAPPIST-1 system, for instance, the innermost planet, TRAPPIST-1 b, completes eight orbits for five of its nearest neighbor's.

Resonance arises among planets born within a protoplanetary disk — the disk of debris surrounding an infant star — that still contains gas. Such planets plow through the gas, exchanging their rotational motion with it, which often causes them to move toward the star. Many of these planets may come close enough to each other for their orbital periods to "resonate," or become whole-number multiples.

Today, the solar system's planets aren't in resonance (although Venus and Mars come close, with an orbital-period ratio of 3.05:1). But in 2005, astronomers showed that Jupiter and Saturn waltzed in a resonant beat soon after their birth. This dance halted abruptly 4.4 billion years ago, however, when the protoplanetary gas disk started evaporating, pushing Saturn, Uranus and Neptune outward in an event called the giant planetary instability.

Related: What's the maximum number of planets that could orbit the sun?

Until now, though, nobody had examined whether the terrestrial planets have ever been in resonance, Chris Ormel, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China and co-author of the new study, told Live Science by email. This was because "an alternative theory — that the planets formed by a series of giant impacts — was thought to be adequate" to explain how they currently behave, he said.

But research from 2013 analyzing Martian isotopes suggested that terrestrial planets could have formed when the protoplanetary disk was still rich in gas, about 10 million years after the solar system's birth. This meant the terrestrial planets may have once been in resonance.

To examine the hypothesis, the new study's authors created computer models of the infant solar system. Each model included two giant planets — Jupiter and Saturn — along with four rocky worlds: Mars, Theia (a hypothetical Mars-size object whose collision with early Earth formed our moon), early Earth (prior to Theia’s collision) and Venus. Mercury is widely believed to have been created by giant impacts, so the researchers excluded it from the simulations.

In all of the models, the team placed Saturn closer to Jupiter than it is today and had the rocky worlds grow by accumulating either pebbles or larger, trillion-ton rock blocks. In most simulations, Venus, Earth, Theia and Mars formed a 2:3:4:6 resonant chain within a million years of simulated time.

The researchers then performed 13,200 simulations of the planets' potential movements over a 100-million-year interval, considering the gravitational tugs each planet exerted on the others. At the 10 million-year mark, however, the researchers made Saturn move outward "to simulate the giant planet instability," Shuo Huang, a doctoral student at Tsinghua University and the study's first author, told Live Science by email.

The researchers found that, based on the selected parameters, up to half of the simulations re-created the terrestrial planets' current configuration. This included aspects like the occurrence of a single Theia-Earth collision and the 3.05:1 orbital-period ratio of Venus and Mars — a relic of their past resonance.

Additionally, the findings suggest the planets formed in the gas-filled protoplanetary disk, within the first 10 million years of the solar system's creation, which is at least 20 million years older than current models predict.

One planet that could confirm how old the rocky inner worlds are is Venus. Because it (unlike Earth and Mars) hasn't suffered any giant impacts, the authors think its mantle will reflect its ancient origin. And future missions could collect such mantle samples, Huang said.

The findings also indicate that outer giant planets can destabilize their inner companions tremendously. The authors said this may explain why resonant systems like TRAPPIST-1 don't have giant outer planets.

The new study was published July 18 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood?

A hidden swarm of "city killer" space rocks, known as co-orbital asteroids, is likely hiding around Venus and could pose an "invisible threat" to Earth over the coming millennia if the asteroids are not found, new simulations suggest. However, there is no immediate danger to our planet, researchers told Live Science.

Co-orbital asteroids are space rocks that orbit the sun alongside a planet or other large body without truly orbiting the larger object. There are currently 20 known co-orbitals around Venus — ranging from "Trojan asteroids," which are fixed either in front of or behind a planet in its orbital plane, to a closely circling "quasimoon," known as Zoozve — all of which likely originated from the solar system's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Dozens of similar co-orbitals also tag along with Earth, and more are being discovered all the time.

All of the Venusian space rocks are likely wider than 460 feet (140 meters) — large enough to be considered "city killers," meaning they could potentially wipe out a heavily populated area if they impacted our planet.

Although the co-orbitals pose no threat to us from afar, a close approach to Earth could cause them to be pulled away from their gravitational anchor — and thus put them on a collision course with our planet. Venus is one of our closest neighbors and comes closer to Earth than any other planet — within around 25 million miles (40 million km) at its nearest point — making its trailing asteroids a credible threat to our world.

Related: Undiscovered extra moons may orbit Earth. Could they help us become an interplanetary species?

Researchers think there are more hidden space rocks lurking around Venus. All but one of the planet's known co-orbitals have eccentricities greater than 0.38, meaning they have very elongated trajectories around the planet. This suggests there is an observational bias, likely because objects with lower eccentricities are probably being obscured by the sun's glare.

Co-orbitals can also move around relative to Venus, which can change their chances of colliding with Earth in the future. Previous research has shown that this likely happens to the space rocks once roughly every 12,000 years — known as a co-orbital cycle.

In a new study, which was uploaded May 21 to the preprint server arXiv and is currently undergoing peer review, researchers carried out a series of computer simulations to gauge whether hidden asteroids with lower eccentricities could threaten Earth. To do this, the researchers "cloned" known co-orbitals with eccentricities below 0.38 and simulated how they might behave over a 36,000-year period (three co-orbital cycles).

The simulations revealed that some of the newly added co-orbitals could pose a threat to Earth during this period. However, the study offers no indication of how likely a future collision really is, because it is "hard to predict" how many co-orbitals there really are, study lead author Valerio Carruba, an astronomer at São Paulo State University in Brazil, told Live Science in an email. "How many exactly is an open question."

"Exciting" asteroids

Since the new study was first uploaded, several media outlets have overhyped the risk of an imminent collision, with several tabloids claiming Earth could be hit by Venusian asteroids "within weeks." But there is nothing in the study to support those claims.

"None of the current co-orbital objects will impact Earth soon," Carruba clarified.

Carruba has been disappointed by some of the reporting surrounding the new study, but is glad the topic is being covered. "There has been some sensationalism about this research, and our work has been cited with some liberties," he said. "But we hope that this attention could raise interest in a very exciting class of asteroids, which should be more carefully monitored."

Related: 'Planet killer' asteroids are hiding in the sun's glare. Can we stop them in time?

The researchers also highlighted the recent discovery of the city killer asteroid 2024 YR4, which was initially predicted to have a 2.3% chance of colliding with Earth in 2032, before the odds were later downgraded to zero. This was an important reminder of the importance of detecting and monitoring potentially hazardous asteroids, they wrote.

New observational tools — such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which will capture its first light later this year — will improve scientists' ability to spot dangerous space rocks, including Venus' co-orbitals, in the coming decades. However, it may also be prudent to send a telescope to Venus' orbit to specifically hunt for these objects, the researchers wrote.

"I believe that we should not underestimate their potential danger, but I would not lose sleep over this issue," Carruba said. "Soon, our understanding of this population will improve."

Scientists may have finally cracked the recipe behind Venus' giant pancakes.

Venus is famous for its "pancake domes" — steep-sided volcanoes that rise from the planet's surface like circular welts. A study now suggests that these unusual dome-shaped structures are at least partly sculpted by the planet's upper crust, which seems more flexible in certain regions.

Volcanoes are common across Venus, with more than 1,600 large volcanoes or volcanic features discovered so far. One of the more intriguing types are the so-called pancake domes, disk-shaped structures that stretch over tens of miles but are only half a mile in height, like a flattened version of Hawaii's Mauna Loa.

Exactly how these volcanoes form — and what they're made of — is still a mystery. One idea is that they develop from super-sticky, slow-flowing lava that moves under the force of its own weight (the technical term for this phenomenon is a viscous gravity current). Eventually, the lava stops moving and solidifies, forming the pancake domes.

But does the domes' formation depend only on the type of lava? Probably not, Madison Borrelli, a postdoctoral researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and first author of the new study, told Live Science by email. One factor that many previous studies hadn't considered was the bendiness', or the flexure, of Venus' upper crust.

It turns out that Venus' surface — and Earth's — behaves, in certain areas, like an orange's skin: under a sufficiently heavy load, the surfaces dimple. If such dimpling accompanied the pancake domes' formation, it would leave certain tell-tale signs, like a bulge surrounding the dome, where the crust buckled upwards. Indeed, a 2021 study found such flexural signatures surrounding one-fifth of a sample of Venusian pancake domes.

Related: Venus may be geologically 'alive' after all, reanalysis of 30-year-old NASA data reveals

To determine how a bendy crust could affect the formation of a pancake dome, Borrelli and her colleagues at universities in France and the U.S. focused on the only dome for which they had high resolution data: the Narina Tholus, an 88.5-mile-wide (55 kilometers) dome located on the circumference of the Aramaiti Corona, one of the many giant oval structures that pockmark Venus' surface.

The new study, published May 10 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, used topographical data collected by NASA's radar-wielding Magellan mission in the 1990s, the researchers created a virtual model of the Narina Tholus dome. They then simulated viscous gravity currents of lavas of different densities atop both a flexible upper crust and a rigid lithosphere, and compared the results to the virtual dome.

The study's results showed that domes created on a bendy crust looked far more like the virtual pancake dome than those that formed on the rigid lithosphere. In particular, the flexible crust's domes had flat tops and very steep sides, characteristic of the pancake domes. This stems from the fact that the bulge around the dome prevents the lava from flowing further, causing it to accumulate, the researchers said. The bendy lithosphere's domes also had flexural signatures similar to that of Narina Tholus.

However, the dimpling of the lithosphere couldn't alone explain the domes' features — the lava's density mattered too. Although low-density lavas produced domes with the right sort of shape, they created smaller crustal bulges than those found near the real-life pancake dome. Only lavas denser than 0.0867 lbs per cubic inch (2,400 kg/m3) — or over twice the density of room temperature water — produced both the correct dome shapes and flexural signatures. These high-density lavas were more than a trillion times as viscous as ketchup at room temperature and settled down to form the domes over hundreds of thousands of Earth-years.

Nonetheless, the study's main drawback is that it used data from just the Narina Tholus dome. Borrelli hopes that upcoming missions to Venus — like NASA's VERITAS program — will provide higher resolution topography of the planet's surface, allowing the researchers to test their model with more data.

The new data could also help determine the exact type of lava that forms the pancake domes, a question the researchers were unable to answer. While most Venusian volcanoes appear to spew Mauna Loa-like basaltic lava, the researchers couldn't rule out rhyolitic and andesitic lavas, similar to those that spout from Mount St. Helens.

Borelli said that finding diverse lava types on Venus would be interesting. "This can tell us about the planet's tectonic history, magmatic processes, and even the potential past presence of water."

Scientists have uncovered fresh evidence that Venus is not dead — geologically speaking. Venus and Earth are similar in size and were bombarded by comparable amounts of water billions of years ago. This shared origin has long fueled one of planetary science's biggest questions: Why did Venus become a hellish, uninhabitable world while Earth flourished into a cradle for life?

Now, more than three decades after NASA's Magellan spacecraft mapped Venus' surface, scientists have found signs of hot material rising from the planet's interior, indicating that its crust is still being sculpted from within.

The findings, published May 14 in the journal Science Advances, add to a growing body of evidence that Venus, despite lacking Earth's plate tectonics, may share more internal dynamics with our planet than scientists previously thought.

Related: Molecule responsible for robbing Venus of its water may finally have been identified

"This research has provided a new and important insight into the possible subsurface processes currently shaping the surface of Venus," Gael Cascioli, an assistant research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who co-led the new study, said in a statement.

"We could hardly believe our eyes"

The latest evidence focuses on dozens of large, ring-shaped features on Venus' surface. These features, known as coronae, form when plumes of hot rock rise from deep within the mantle, pushing the crust upward. As the surface cools and collapses, a circular structure is left behind. Cascioli and his team simulated several formation scenarios for these features and compared their results with data from Magellan.

The predicted and actual data aligned so closely for some coronae that "we could hardly believe our eyes," Cascioli told Scientific American.

Of the 75 coronae they resolved in the Magellan data, 52 appear to sit above buoyant mantle plumes, according to the new study.

"We can now say there are most likely various and ongoing active processes driving their formation," Anna Gülcher, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who co-led the new study, said in the statement. "We believe these same processes may have occurred early in Earth's history."

Venus hosts hundreds of such coronae, many of which are found in areas where the planet's crust is particularly thin and heat from below is high. Recent research simulated how different rock types behave under Venus' extreme conditions. The findings suggest that the planet's crust may break off or melt once it reaches around 40 miles (65 kilometers) thick, and in many areas, it is likely even thinner.

"That is surprisingly thin, given conditions on the planet," Justin Filiberto, deputy chief of NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division in Houston, who co-authored the study about Venus' crust, said in a different statement.

This shedding or melting of the crust not only helps regulate Venus' surface structure but could also recycle water and other materials back into the planet's interior, potentially fueling volcanic activity and influencing its atmosphere, Filiberto explained. "It resets the playing field for how the geology, crust and atmosphere on Venus work together," he said.

These recent findings offer testable predictions for upcoming missions to Venus that will gather direct data about the planet's crust and geology to refine existing models.

Scientists aim to pinpoint areas of surface activity using data from NASA's VERITAS mission, which will map the planet's surface at a resolution two to four times higher than previous missions. Another NASA mission, DAVINCI, slated for 2029, will focus on studying Venus' atmosphere and surface chemistry, while the European Space Agency's EnVision mission, targeted for 2030, will provide high-resolution surface mapping.

These missions will deliver "a level of detail that could revolutionize our understanding of Venus's geology and its implications for early Earth," study co-author Suzanne Smrekar, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in the statement.

A doomed 53-year-old Soviet lander currently tumbling back to Earth could be trailing a parachute, new images of the spacecraft reveal.

The Kosmos 482 probe, which launched in 1972, was built to land on Venus as part of the former U.S.S.R.'s Venera program. But a malfunction in the rocket it was mounted on caused the spacecraft to split in two, with the main body crashing back to Earth in 1981 and the lander section remaining trapped in orbit ever since.

Now, after news broke that the lander will finally return to our planet sometime around May 10, satellite trackers have analyzed photos of the craft and revealed an unknown object trailing behind it.

"Some structure is connected to the capsule," Ralf Vandebergh, a Dutch astronomer and astrophotographer, wrote on the social platform X. "Not impossible that it's the parachute, but this is still speculation!"

Kosmos 482 was built as a sister probe to Venera 8, which launched in July 1972 to become the second craft (following Venera 7) to land on Venus. Once there, Venera 8 beamed data from Venus for just over 50 minutes before being fried by the planet's blisteringly hot atmosphere.

Related: 5,000-pound European satellite burns up over Pacific Ocean after 30 years in orbit

Designed to survive passage through Venus' atmosphere, the 1,091-pound (495 kilograms), 3-foot (1 meter) lander is likely to return to Earth intact.

Vanderbergh snagged this first set of high-resolution images in July 2024 and posted them on X on April 29, 2025. In side-by-side comparisons with photos captured in June 2014, both sets of images appear to show "a compact ball" with "a weak elongated structure at one particular side of the ball" appearing in several frames, he said.

Even if this trailing material is indeed the lander's parachute, it's unlikely that it will survive the craft's approximate 150 mph (242 km/h) reentry through our planet's atmosphere.

"If it is true that this is the parachute that came out a long time ago in space, this would mean it is likely to burn up on reentry and will have no function in slowing down the spacecraft," Vanderberg wrote on X.

With satellite watchers avidly tracking the spacecraft's descent, further images and up-to-date projections of where it will land are sure to follow. Watch this space.

A chunk from a 53-year-old Soviet spacecraft designed to land on Venus is set to cannonball back to Earth next weekend, and nobody knows where it might land.

The Kosmos 482 probe, made and launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1972, was built as part of the Venera program that collected data from Venus's hellish surface.

But a malfunction in the upper stage of the Soyuz rocket booster that lofted the ship skyward scuppered its mission, leaving the craft without the required velocity to reach the planet and instead marooning it in an elliptical orbit around our own.

Now, a telescope analysis conducted by a space researcher and satellite watcher has revealed that the descent module of the failed spaceship is due for an imminent fiery return to Earth — sometime around May 10, give or take a few days.

Related: 5,000-pound European satellite burns up over Pacific Ocean after 30 years in orbit

"As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in space situational awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who discovered the lander's impending return, wrote in a blog post. "The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero."

Kosmos 482 was built as a sister probe to Venera 8, which launched in July 1972 to become the second craft (following Venera 7) to land on Venus's scorching surface. Once there, Venera 8 beamed data from Venus for just over 50 minutes before being fried by the inhospitable planet's blisteringly-hot atmosphere.

Following its failed launch, Kosmos 482 broke into two pieces consisting of the main body and the lander. The former reentered Earth's atmosphere nine years after launch on May 5 1981, while the descent craft remained trapped inside a slowly decaying orbit that has persisted for more than 50 years.

When the 1,091 pound (495 kilograms), 3-foot (1 meter) lander returns to Earth, Langbroek predicts that it will be travelling at roughly 150 mph (242 km/h), so he likens the risk of its impact to that of a meteorite. As for where the doomed craft will land, Langbroek says it's still too early to tell.

"With an orbital inclination of 52 degrees, the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft could come down anywhere between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude," he wrote in an article for The Space Review. "This includes much of south and mid-latitude Europe and Asia, as well as the Americas and the whole of Africa and Australia. Of course, the biggest chances are that it will land in one of the oceans, as the failed Phobos-Grunt Venus mission did on January 15, 2011."

With satellite trackers continuing to observe the spacecraft's tumble from orbit, a clearer picture of its uncontrolled reentry will emerge in the coming days.

Go outside an hour before sunrise on Thursday, April 24, and if the skies are clear, you'll be greeted by a spectacular sight in the east: Venus shining at -4.4 magnitude — its brightest, as seen from Earth, until Sept. 22, 2026.

Venus currently has the nickname the "Morning Star" because it rises in the east and shines brightly just before sunrise. It's been that way only since March 22, when the planet traveled roughly between Earth and the sun and was lost in the sun's glare for a few weeks.

That was Venus' inferior conjunction with the sun, according to In-The-Sky.org. Prior to that, the planet had been shining very brightly as the "Evening Star" in the west just after sunset, reaching -4.6 magnitude on Feb. 16. (Lower magnitudes correspond to brighter objects.)

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2025

Venus has been shining brightly in recent months because it's been close to Earth. In fact, Venus has been undertaking Earth on the inside on its 225-Earth-day orbit of the sun. Because Earth takes a longer 365 days to complete an orbit, Venus must approach Earth, undertake it and then travel away from it.

As a result, Venus gets much larger and brighter from our perspective on Earth. But something else happens to it, too. If you use a good telescope on April 24, you will see that, despite being so bright, Venus is a 23%-illuminated crescent. Just as we see the moon as a crescent as it orbits Earth, we see the inner planets — Venus and Mercury — as crescents as they orbit the sun. Check back a month later, on May 24, and Venus will shine at -4.2 magnitude and be 45%-lit.

Although Venus will be at its most brilliant from Earth on April 24, it will appear bright throughout late April. If you have clear skies on April 25, you'll see an 8%-illuminated crescent moon just below Venus, while Saturn will sit just below Venus throughout April. Together, the three celestial objects will briefly form a smiley face in the sky.

If you look up to the sky in the early hours of April 25 you might just see it smiling back at you, NASA skywatchers have forecast.

That's when a rare celestial spectacle called a triple conjunction will occur. On the morning of Friday, April 25, Venus, Saturn and the crescent moon will appear close together in the predawn sky, forming a triangular formation reminiscent of a smiley face. You can spot the celestial spectacle close to the eastern horizon just before sunrise, according to NASA. Both planets are bright and easily seen with the naked eye, but a good backyard telescope or stargazing binoculars can help you pick out details on the smirking crescent moon.

Mercury may also be visible below the twinkling trio for those with a clear view of the horizon, according to NASA. Unlike the larger planets, it will appear very low in the sky, so may not be visible everywhere.

What is a triple conjunction?

In astronomy, a conjunction occurs when two or more celestial objects appear very close to each other in the night sky. When three objects are involved, it becomes a triple conjunction.

"Venus is higher above the eastern horizon with Saturn lower, and a thin, crescent Moon a bit lower and a little farther north," NASA Solar System Ambassador Brenda Culbertson told local Kansas TV station KSNT. "The thin, crescent Moon looks like a smile. To some people, the triangle of bright objects may appear as a smiley face."

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2025

The face will be visible from anywhere in the world with good viewing conditions, although the window in which to watch it will be narrow — Culbertson said that the alignment will slide into place at around 5:30 a.m on April 25 and the sun will rise around an hour later.

"Anyone wanting to try for a glimpse of the conjunction should find a clear eastern horizon from which to observe," Culbertson said.

The conjunction will light up the skies just days after the Lyrids meteor shower peaks. The shower is ongoing, but the peak can be seen anytime between 10:30 p.m. and 5 a.m. local time from April 21 to 22, with little interference from the waning crescent moon. According to NASA, up to 15 meteors will be visible per hour under dark skies.

New photos have revealed the "love planet" Venus looking unrecognizable as it prepares to line up for a striking conjunction later this week. The hellish world has transformed into a slim crescent, which can look like a giant fiery rainbow under the right conditions.

On March 23, Venus will reach its inferior conjunction, or the point at which it lies directly between Earth and the sun. On this day, the sun's glare will make it almost impossible to see the planet. But even if we could see it, it would be covered in shadow, similar to a new moon. Over the last few weeks and months, the planet has been waning as it gets closer to alignment, giving it an increasingly crescent-like appearance.

Astrophotographer Douglas Kostyk set out to capture the disappearing planet on March 8 at the Marian and Max Farash Center for Observational Astronomy in Ionia, New York — when only around 7% of Venus was visible. But his photos also showed that the crescent looked like a cosmic rainbow.

The striking rainbow effect is caused by particles in Earth's atmosphere refracting, or splitting apart, different wavelengths of light like a prism, according to Spaceweather.com. "When Venus is near the horizon, refraction separates the red crescent from the blue," Spaceweather.com representatives wrote. "The crescent is so thin, the splitting of colors is obvious."

Related: Parisian photographer produces phenomenal, perfectly-proportioned 'planetary parade' portrait

The same effect was also captured by Kevin R. Witman, who snapped a less-detailed image of Venus' rainbow crescent from Cochranville, Pennsylvania on March 9. In this image, the rainbow's colors are inverted compared to Kostyk's photo because the planet was in a different part of the sky relative to the observer.

More recently, on March 16, astronomer Raffaello Lena captured video footage of the rainbow effect from near Rome, Italy. In this instance, atmospheric turbulence caused the light coming from Venus to shimmer and become distorted, making it appear as if the rainbow was "on fire," Spaceweather.com reported.

Parading planet

Venus has become unusually bright in recent weeks as it gets closer to Earth, which has made it a prime target for astronomy enthusiasts since early February onwards. During this time, the hellish world also starred in a rare planetary parade, when all of the solar system's worlds appeared in the night sky at one point or another.

Venus was one of the most clearly visible planets throughout the parade, often appearing close to the moon and occasionally right alongside other planets like Mercury. It was also one of the most easily identifiable bodies when all seven planets were photographed in a line in late February.

Bright Venus is easily spotted with the naked eye, but to make out its crescent-like appearance you’ll need a strong pair of stargazing binoculars or a good backyard telescope.

The planetary parade is now over. However, several planets will remain easier to spot than usual in the coming weeks and months. After the upcoming inferior conjunction, Venus will begin its waxing phase and transition from a slim crescent to its more usual filled-in appearance. As this happens, the rainbow effect should still be visible for a few weeks if the conditions are right.

Venus reaches an inferior conjunction approximately every 18 months. The next time this happens will be on Oct. 24, 2026.

The rare planetary parade that brought all seven of Earth's neighboring worlds into the night sky is finally breaking up — but not before a final curtain call from the two planets closest to the sun. If you can find a view low to the western horizon on Monday, March 10, you may see a rare conjunction between Venus and Mercury — the two planets interior to Earth in the solar system — before they fully disappear in the sun's glare over the following nights.

Although Venus and Mercury will be visible only briefly after sunset, the sight of these two planets close to each other is quite rare. When two objects appear close to each other in the sky, it's called a conjunction. This one will take place over several nights, but the best time to see it will be on March 10, when Venus and Mercury will be visible about half an hour after sunset and remain in view for around 45 minutes.

The event will be visible to the naked eye, though a pair of stargazing binoculars may be helpful. Arguably more important are an unobstructed view due west and clear skies, as the conjunction will take place very close to the horizon.

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2025

The conjunction between the two inner planets is happening because of celestial mechanics. Venus, on its 225-day orbit of the sun, is currently lapping Earth on the inside track and is at its closest to Earth this month as it ever gets. The planet, which is now a crescent as seen from Earth in a telescope, will pass in front of the sun from Earth's point of view on March 22. It will remain lost in the sun's glare for some weeks, only to emerge into the predawn morning sky in April.

Mercury, which orbits the sun every 88 days, reaches its highest altitude in the evening sky on March 8. Although Mercury has been rising as Venus sinks, both will now disappear from the evening sky.

As Venus and Mercury exit the stage, a few remnants of the "planetary parade" will be visible after sunset. With Saturn already lost in the sun from Earth's point of view as it moves behind the sun on March 12, the only planets that will remain visible to the naked eye in the night sky will be Mars and Jupiter.

As we bid farewell to the planetary parade, you can still look forward to a total lunar eclipse that will be visible from North America overnight from March 13 to 14. Here are the places that will get the best views.

A stunning photo has captured all seven of our neighboring planets in Earth's sky at the same time, possibly for the first time ever.

The composite image, captured by astrophotographer Josh Dury, shows Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, Venus, Neptune and Mercury in alignment thanks to a rare "planetary parade" taking place this weekend for the first time since 1982. (Here's how you can see it for yourself tonight).

While spacecraft, such as NASA's Voyager 1, have snapped all the planets in the sky from space, terrestrial cameras have only recently become advanced enough to capture them from the ground — meaning Dury's photo is likely the very first of its kind.

"Seven (arguably, 8) is a feat that to my prior knowledge has not been achieved before," Dury told Live Science in an email — suggesting that if we include Earth itself, visible in the foreground, the image's planet total comes to eight. "This image could hold a record for being the first of its kind to photograph all the planets of the solar system, blended into a stitched panoramic image."

Dury captured the image just after sundown on Feb. 22 from The Mendip Hills — a range of limestone hills in Somerset in the U.K.

Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?

To achieve this photographic feat, Dury created a composite shot made up of several panes, with each pane captured in multiple exposures.

To locate Saturn, Neptune and Mercury, which were dimmer and closer to the western horizon, Dury used astronomy software to generate models of the night sky and match planetary locations to nearby star fields. He then used a high dynamic range (HDR) camera setting to capture the planets' faint light.

"I noted that when I took the image that it would not, of course, be possible to photograph the lowest planets at the moment of sunset — glare from the sun rendering this task impossible," Dury said. "Therefore, this image is a record of the first possible glimpse of the planets as light from the sun diminished." The night-sky models enabled him to later identify the planets in the image.

Planetary conjunctions occur when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky. Of course, this is only from our perspective of the cosmos on Earth — in reality the planets remain extremely far apart.

These conjunctions aren't rare, but they get rarer with each planet added to the chain. For example, the three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every 39.6 years. For all of the solar system's eight planets to align as closely, it would take 396 billion years, something that has never happened and won't happen before the sun becomes a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and likely Earth in the process.

However, it is a little less unusual for all seven planets to appear spread out on the same side of the sun, as they do in Dury's image and in the night sky right now. Another seven-planet parade is expected to be visible from Earth in 2040.

If you'd like to see a planetary alignment for yourself, tonight (Feb. 28) is one of the best times to look. Time and Date and Stellarium are two great online tools for finding viewing times based on your location.

Seven planets in the solar system — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — will line up in the night sky Friday (Feb. 28) in an incredibly rare "planetary parade."

Although most of these planets have been visible in the night sky since January, Mercury will be joining the procession for just a few days, before Saturn gets lost in the sunset's glare in early March.

Five of these worlds will be easily visible to the unaided eye, but you will need a good telescope to see the full show, according to NASA.

That's because at least two of the planets — Uranus and Neptune — will be too dim to see with the naked eye and will likely be masked by the glare of the setting sun at twilight, NASA said. Saturn will also be trickier to see in some locations due to its position close to the horizon.

If you have a good telescope to catch the full display, the best time to view all seven planets in the Northern Hemisphere will be after sunset on Friday (Feb. 28) at around 8:30 p.m. local time, according to SkyatNightMagazine.

Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?

Planetary conjunctions occur when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky. Of course, this is only from our perspective on Earth; in reality, the planets remain extremely far apart.

Conjunctions happen because the planets of the solar system orbit the sun along roughly the same flat plane as Earth, and they occasionally align when their different orbital distances and speeds bring them into a cluster on Earth's nightside.

These conjunctions aren't rare, but they do get rarer with each planet added to the chain. The three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every 39.6 years. For all of the solar system's eight planets to align that closely, it would take 396 billion years — something that has never happened and won't happen before the sun becomes a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and likely Earth in the process.

We recommend Time and Date and Stellarium as two great online tools for finding viewing dates and times based on where you are in the world. On mobile phones, Sky Tonight is a free app that will do the same job.

A striking new "planetary parade" photo combines images of six solar system worlds alongside the moon, providing a rare opportunity to compare the sizes of these celestial objects as they currently appear from Earth.

French astrophotographer Gwenaël Blanck created the stunning image by combining individual shots of each of the objects captured Feb. 2 from Paris, where he also took an exceptional photo of Venus and the moon aligning above the Eiffel Tower a day earlier.

The individual images were captured between 6:30 p.m. and 7:50 p.m. local time, using a digital camera attached to a telescope. Blanck then made a composite image of the six worlds in a straight line for the final photo. The objects are arranged from closest to Earth (left) to farthest from our planet (right): the moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

"I had to start quite early, shortly after sunset, to image Venus and Saturn before they were too low on the horizon," Blanck told Live Science in an email. "Neptune was also not far away [from the horizon]," he added. "It was probably the most difficult to capture."

"The Moon, Uranus, Jupiter and Mars were easier to capture, as they were higher in the sky," Blanck said. "The only missing planet was Mercury, which will become visible towards the end of the month and early March."

Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?

In reality, the objects in the image were scattered across the night sky. However, Blanck used the same magnification settings for each image, meaning the objects' sizes are perfectly scaled. That is why the moon looks so massive compared with Uranus and Neptune and why Venus and Jupiter appear to be around the same size, despite the latter being more than 10 times wider than the former.

"This gives a pretty good idea of the apparent size of each planet," Blanck said.

Planetary parade

We are currently in the midst of one of the most impressive planetary alignment events in recent years. Under the right circumstances, five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — will be visible to the naked eye over the next few weeks. Uranus and Neptune are also present in the night sky, but you'll need a good telescope to see them alongside their brighter neighbors.

The event has already delivered some special moments, including an earlier alignment of six of the seven planets in late January and an occultation of Mars by the moon on Feb. 9. However, the parade will not peak until late February and early March, when all seven planets will align in a near-straight line along the horizon, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Venus will be the brightest planet in the night sky during this period; it will be closest to the moon in the sky, making it easy to spot on most clear nights. The "love planet" will reach its peak brightness in time for Valentine's Day (Feb. 14).

If you want to see the best of the planetary parade for yourself, we recommend using a decent telescope or a pair of stargazing binoculars.

The next time we will see a similar alignment of the planets will be in October 2028.

Venus, a planet named after the Roman goddess of love, will fittingly be at its brilliant best on Valentine's Day (Feb. 14) this year.

Currently reigning supreme in the post-sunset night sky, Venus is living up to its nickname as the "evening star." Although it's always the brightest planet in the night sky when visible — second only to the sun and moon in brightness — it reaches a magnitude of -4.9, its greatest brilliance, in mid-February. The planet won't appear this bright in the evening sky again until September 2026, according to EarthSky.

Venus reached its highest point in the evening sky on Jan. 10 and will sink into the sun's glare on March 22, with its brightest evening appearance coming midway between those two extremes.

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2025

The visibility and brightness of Venus are the result of where it orbits the sun in the solar system. As the second planet from the sun, Venus always sits interior to Earth and thus has phases similar to the moon's, as seen from our planet. As Venus gets closer to Earth — as it is doing right now — it shrinks to a crescent. Despite being just 27% illuminated on Feb. 14, its close proximity to Earth at the time will give us our brightest view of the planet all year. By March 1, Venus will be just 14% lit — so now is a great time to see Venus through a backyard telescope or pair of good skywatching binoculars.

Venus' remarkable brightness occurs not only because it's getting closer to Earth. It's also relatively large (only a few hundred miles smaller than Earth in diameter), and its cloud layers are highly reflective.

Enjoy the convenient post-sunset views of Venus this Valentine's Day, because from then on, the planet's brightness will wane as it shrinks to an ever-slimmer crescent. Come March, Venus will be tricky to see in the post-sunset sky. After passing through the sun's glare in late March, the planet will emerge into the predawn sky and reach its greatest morning sky brilliance on April 27.

A striking new photo captures a colorful conjunction of Venus and the moon stealing the show in the night sky over Paris — even outshining competition from an iconic illuminated landmark. The incredible image is the result of a rare "parade of planets" that will peak later this month.

French astrophotographer Gwenaël Blanck took the stunning shot at around 8:00 p.m. local time on Feb. 1 from the banks of the Seine river. It shows a bright crescent moon and one of our closest planetary neighbors almost perfectly aligned with a beam of blue light shooting into the sky from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

"This is one of the rare celestial events that make people look up even under light-polluted skies," Blanck wrote on Instagram. "A lot of tourists and passers-by were admiring the scene while I was shooting."

Saturn is also visible in the image as a faint spot to the right of the Eiffel Tower. However, it was much harder to spot than the other celestial objects.

Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?

"The Moon (with a beautiful Earthshine) and Venus could not be missed, but Saturn was way more difficult to see, especially in the light pollution," Blanck wrote.

Earthshine is a phenomenon where the dark portions of the moon's Earth-facing side are illuminated by light reflecting off our planet. This mainly happens for a few days on either side of a new moon and is most clearly visible in the Northern Hemisphere in spring, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Planetary parade

We are currently in the midst of one of the most impressive planetary alignment events in recent years. Under the right circumstances, five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — will be visible to the naked eye over the next few weeks. The other two solar system worlds, Uranus and Neptune, are also present in the night sky but require a good telescope to see alongside their brighter neighbors.

The event has already delivered some special shots, including an alignment of six of the seven planets in late January, but the parade will not peak until late February and early March, when all seven planets will align in a near-straight line along the horizon, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Venus will be the brightest planet in the night sky during this period and is located closest to the moon in the sky, making it easy to spot on most clear nights.

If you want to see the best of the planetary parade for yourself, we recommend using a decent telescope or a pair of stargazing binoculars.

The next time we will see a similar alignment of the planets will be October 2028.

Another spectacular year for stargazers lies ahead. From the appearance of a brilliantly bright Venus to the first total lunar eclipse since 2022, there will be plenty of reasons to look skywards at night this year. Other highlights will include a deep partial solar eclipse in North America, four moonless meteor showers and three supermoons. While many of these events will be visible to the naked eye, investing now in a good beginner telescope can greatly enhance your experience.

Quadrantid meteor shower

When: Jan. 3/4, 2025

The Quadrantid meteor shower, the first meteor shower of the year for the Northern Hemisphere, can often impress — if you can stand the cold — with between 25 and 200 shooting stars per hour during its peak. It's also the last meteor shower until April's Lyrids.

Venus at its brightest

When: Feb. 19, 2025

As Venus reaches its closest point to Earth, it will shine at -4.5 magnitude — as bright as it ever gets — but the dazzling sight will reveal something else if you point a small telescope at it. As an inner planet, when it nears Earth, it appears as a crescent; watch from Jan. 11 to Feb. 19, and you'll see it shrink each night.

Total lunar eclipse

When: March 13 to 14, 2025

The first total eclipse of the moon since late 2022 will turn the lunar surface a gorgeous orangey-reddish color for 65 minutes. North America will get a ringside seat, with the event seen throughout the continent during the night. Europe isn't so lucky, as it will get just a glimpse of the phenomenon during moonset.

Northern lights at equinox

When: March 20 and Sept. 22, 2025

The equinoxes, when Earth's axis is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun, create the ideal geometry for reliable and spectacular displays of auroras around the poles — and this year, these light shows will likely occur farther north and south. With the sun at solar maximum in 2025, expect increased solar activity, including aurora-triggering outbursts, particularly in the few weeks after the equinoxes.

Partial solar eclipse

When: March 29, 2025

Although it won't match the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, for sheer drama, those in northeastern U.S. states and eastern provinces in Canada may glimpse an eclipsed sunrise if skies are clear. This partial solar eclipse will see as much as 94% of the sun blocked by the moon, and it will also occur across Europe and northwest Africa.

Lyrid meteor shower

When: April 21 to 22, 2025

With 2024's Perseids — the most prolific and popular meteor shower of the year — marred by bright moonlight, other meteor showers will have to pick up the slack. With a crescent moon setting early in the evening, expect a good show from the Lyrids, which deliver about 10 to 20 shooting stars per hour and a few super-bright fireballs. April is also a good month to begin looking for the Milky Way later at night.

Eta Aquariid meteor shower

When: May 6 to 7, 2025

Expect about 60 shooting stars per hour during the peak of the Eta Aquariids, which will take place under ideal astronomical conditions. It is one of two meteor showers caused by dust and debris left in the inner solar system by Halley's comet (the other being November Orionids). The Eta Aquariids are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere.

Saturn at opposition

When: Sept. 21, 2025

Saturn will be at its brightest and best in late September as Earth passes between the gas giant and the sun. This will be the best time to see Saturn, though you'll need a small telescope to see its rings. There will be no opposition from Jupiter in 2025 — the giant planet will align with Earth and the sun early in 2026.

Venus and Jupiter conjunction

When: Aug. 12, 2025

Get up before sunrise on this date, and you'll likely see the beautiful sight of Jupiter and Venus shining just a degree from each other. That's less than the width of your little finger held out at arm's length against the sky. Jupiter will shine at -1.8 magnitude and Venus at -3.9 magnitude.

Beaver supermoon

When: Nov. 5, 2025

There will be three supermoons in 2025, the closest of which will be November's Beaver Moon at 221,726 miles (356,833 kilometers) from Earth. It will be the closest full moon this year and the closest since 2019. It will be preceded by October's Hunter's Moon and December's Cold Moon, with January 2026's Wolf Moon also being a supermoon.

Archaeologists in France have discovered an 1,800-year-old gold ring with a chiseled portrait of Venus, a Roman goddess associated with victory in battle, in addition to a handful of coins from a much later era, when the Carolingian Empire ruled the region.

The ring was found in an "exceptional state of preservation" near the town of Pacé, in Brittany, according to a translated statement from the French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP). Its gemstone bears a carving of Venus Victrix, which translates to "Venus the Victorious," according to INRAP. The gemstone is a nicolo, or a type of onyx that is cut so it has a faint bluish layer over a thicker layer of black. This centerpiece is framed in gold, with linear patterns etched around it.

The ring dates to the second or third century A.D., when the Roman Empire ruled the region, which explains why it was discovered on a Roman road. The road still has ruts, which indicate that wheeled vehicles travelled along it, probably to service people who lived in a nearby settlement. It's unknown who the ring belongs to or how it ended up on the Roman road.

Medieval coins

At the same site, archaeologists also discovered the remains of a medieval hamlet that flourished around 1,300 years ago. Archaeologists at the site found the remnants of houses, farmers' fields, pastures and underground silos used for storage. It seems that the buildings were constructed using earth, wood, plaster and adobe, while the roofs were made with plant-based materials.

Related: 1,800-year-old ring depicting Roman goddess discovered by ancient quarry in Israel

The most "exceptional" discovery from this layer was a dozen coins that date to the ninth to 10th centuries A.D. that were deposited together.

The coins date to a time when the area was ruled by the Carolingian Empire, which encompassed most of modern-day France and neighboring parts of western Europe. However, their empire was weakened by raids launched by the Vikings, which forced them to cede land to Viking groups. The hamlet itself appears to have been abandoned during the 10th century, during the Viking Age. However it's not clear if its abandonment and the deposition of the coins is because of Viking raids.

Other artifacts found in the hamlet include the remains of tableware, cooking pots and millstones used to grind grain.

Scientists have poured cold water on the idea that Venus could once have supported life. The disappointing revelation emerged from the fact it appears water oceans could never have existed on the surface of our neighboring planet.

Venus is often referred to as Earth's "evil twin" because, despite it being a virtual hellscape today, it is believed that our neighbor was much more like our planet in its ancient past.

This new research suggests that Venus was always a hellish planet, and despite its similar mass and distance from the sun to Earth, it was never a twin to our planet in other respects.

The findings are the work of a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge. They arrived at their conclusions by examining the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere.

The team's research, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, could have implications beyond the solar system. The findings could assist astronomers in selecting extrasolar planets or "exoplanets" most likely to be habitable.

"Even though it’s the closest planet to us, Venus is important for exoplanet science because it gives us a unique opportunity to explore a planet that evolved very differently to ours, right at the edge of the habitable zone," team leader Tereza Constantinou, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, said in a statement.

Alternative history Venus

Currently, Venus has a scorching hot surface temperature of around 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead.

If that weren't intimidating enough, the second planet from the sun also has clouds of sulfuric acid.

Despite these extreme conditions, many scientists theorize that Venus may have been habitable billions of years ago. Much of the investigation into this question has focused on water, which we understand is the key ingredient for life.

There are two primary concepts of how Venus could have evolved over the last 4.6 billion years.

One idea suggests that the planet was once cool enough to host liquid water. According to this theory, this situation changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect driven by volcanic activity.

As a result, Venus gradually became hotter and hotter, reaching the point at which it could no longer harbor water in a liquid state.

The other theory suggests that Venus never harbored liquid water because the planet was "born hot." The team's results seem to favor this waterless alternative history.

"Both of those theories are based on climate models, but we wanted to take a different approach based on observations of Venus' current atmospheric chemistry," said Constantinou. "To keep the Venusian atmosphere stable, then any chemicals being removed from the atmosphere should also be getting restored to it, since the planet’s interior and exterior are in constant chemical communication with one another."

In particular, the researchers looked at how rapidly water, carbon dioxide and carbonyl sulfide are destroyed in the Venusian atmosphere and, thus, how quickly they must be replenished from the planet's interior via volcanism.

By carrying material to the surface of planets to its mantle and releasing it as gas, magma driven by volcanism gives a hint at these world's interiors.

Earth's volcanic eruptions are mostly steam because of our world's water-rich interior. The team discovered that Venus's volcanic gases are, on the other hand, no more than 6% steam.

From these dry eruptions, the researchers inferred that Venus's interior is too dry for the planet to have ever had enough water to supply oceans at its surface.

"We won’t know for sure whether Venus can or did support life until we send probes at the end of this decade," Constantinou said. "But given it likely never had oceans, it is hard to imagine Venus ever having supported Earth-like life, which requires liquid water."

Humanity may not have to wait long to answer this question. NASA's DAVINCI mission is currently expected to launch in June 2029, and it will reach Venus two years later.

Once in situ around the hellish planet, DAVINCI will drop a probe through its atmosphere, collecting vital data. Though the probe isn't designed to survive the descent, there is the chance it could catch a 7-second glimpse of the Venusian surface.

Constantinou explained that if Venus was habitable in the past, it would mean exoplanets that we have already discovered could also be habitable.

"Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope are best at studying the atmospheres of planets close to their host star, like Venus. But if Venus was never habitable, then it makes Venus-like planets elsewhere less likely candidates for habitable conditions or life," Constantinou said.

"We would have loved to find that Venus was once a planet much closer to our own, so it’s kind of sad in a way to find out that it wasn’t, but ultimately, it’s more useful to focus the search on planets that are mostly likely to be able to support life – at least life as we know it."

A rare and stunning photo recently captured a "parade of planets," in which six planets in our solar system appeared together in the predawn sky.

The image shows Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in alignment. Mars and Saturn are clearly visible near a crescent moon, while the positions of the remaining planets, which were too distant to be seen with the naked eye, were revealed by two composite long exposures. 

Astrophotographer Josh Dury captured the planetary parade on June 1 in the early hours of the morning from The Mendip Hills — a range of limestone hills in the county of Somerset in the U.K. on June 1. 

The annotated image shows Mars and Saturn clearly visible near a crescent moon, while the positions of the remaining planets (too distant to be seen with the naked eye but faintly visible in the image) were revealed by two composite long exposures.

"I thought no better than to climb Crooks Peak at the unearthly hour of 2am," Dury told Live Science via email. "As time passed, it was a really special experience. Being able to see one planet after another rising and being present in my images was fantastic and really encapsulated a sense of perspective of our place within the solar system, let alone the universe."

Related: Have all 8 planets ever aligned?

Planetary conjunctions occur when two or more planets appear to be close together in the sky. Of course, this is only from our perspective of the cosmos on Earth — in reality the planets remain extremely far apart.

These conjunctions aren't rare, but they do get rarer with each planet added to the chain. The three innermost planets  — Mercury, Venus and Earth — align within 3.6 degrees in the sky every 39.6 years. For all of the solar system's eight planets to align as closely, it would take 396 billion years — something that has never happened and won't happen before the sun becomes a red giant, consuming Mercury, Venus and likely Earth in the process, Live Science previously reported. 

If you'd like to see a planetary alignment for yourself, Time and Date and Stellarium are two great online tools for finding viewing dates and times based on where you are in the world.

The Japanese space agency said it has lost contact with its intrepid Venus spacecraft Akatsuki.

Akatsuki is Japan's mission dedicated to studying the climate of Venus and currently the only active spacecraft in orbit around the second planet from the sun. The $300 million spacecraft launched in 2010 and had a less than stellar start to its mission, failing to enter orbit around Venus due to a failure of its main engine. However, the mission team managed to contrive a second opportunity in 2015 after five years of orbiting the sun, successfully entering orbit.

The spacecraft, also known as Venus Climate Orbiter, has been conducting science ever since, making some unexpected observations. These activities may now be at an end, however.

Related: Venus is leaking carbon and oxygen, and scientists aren't totally sure why

JAXA’s mission account for Akatsuki posted on X Wednesday (May 29) that the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) had "lost contact with Akatsuki after an operation in late April due to an extended period of low attitude stability control mode, and is currently making efforts to reestablish communication with the spacecraft."

The spacecraft will need to be able to maintain a stable orientation in order to point its antenna and communicate with Earth.

"We will inform you about future plans once they are fixed. Thank you for your warm support," a second post from the Akatsuki team read.

Akatsuki, which means "dawn" in Japanese, has already worked past its primary mission. The spacecraft began an extended phase of operations in 2018. 

Even if Akatsuki cannot be rescued this time, the mission has proven the problem-solving capabilities of JAXA engineers and enhanced our understanding of Venus' climate and atmospheric dynamics. 

And, even if Akatsuki is indeed dead, Earth's sister planet might not remain unobserved for long. Questions of why Venus suffered a strong greenhouse effect, making it the hottest planet in the solar system, and the tantalizing readings of potential biomarkers in its atmosphere, mean the planet is receiving renewed interest. 

New missions, notably from NASA, the European Space Agency, India and a private mission, could be heading to Venus later in the decade. 

Originally published on Space.com.

In a year in which we have already been treated to the "Great North American Solar Eclipse" in April and one of the greatest displays of Northern Lights in the past 500 years in May, what other amazing celestial attractions might 2024 have in store for us?

How about a bright naked-eye comet?

Over the last couple of years, two comets have made headlines in the mainstream media. In early February 2023, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), informally called the "Great Green Comet", passed near Earth and then during the past month, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks drew attention because of its propensity for experiencing sudden flare-up in brightness and appearing to spout gaseous appendages resembling horns, thus giving rise to the moniker "Devil's Comet." 

The only problem so far as the person-on-the-street was concerned was that both comets were difficult to see unless you were located under a dark, non-light polluted sky. And even through good binoculars or a small telescope, both were rather unimpressive, appearing as nothing more than faint, fuzzy blobs of light.

Related: Space photo of the week: NASA sees a 'Platypus' move on Jupiter's moon Europa

Bright? Easy-to-see? 

The only problem so far as the person-on-the-street was concerned was that both comets were difficult to see unless you were located under a dark, non-light polluted sky. And even through good binoculars or a small telescope, both were rather unimpressive, appearing as nothing more than faint, fuzzy blobs of light.

But by the end of this summer, we may have a good idea as to whether we'll have a bright and easy-to-see naked-eye comet gracing our early autumn evening sky. The comet in question is C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa on Feb. 22, 2023. ATLAS is a robotic early warning system developed specifically for detecting near-Earth asteroids a few weeks to just days before they might impact Earth. 

Originally thought to be an asteroid, it was later determined that this same object was photographed six weeks earlier by the Purple Mountain Observatory (Tsuchinshan) in the east of Nanjing, China. It has since been determined to actually be an incoming comet.

When the comet was first sighted, it was far out beyond the orbit of Jupiter, some 680 million miles (1.09 billion km) from the sun. But on Sept. 27 of this year, Tsuchinshan–ATLAS will be making its closest approach to the sun, coming to within 36 million miles (58 million km). That also happens to be the average distance of the planet that is closest to the sun, Mercury. 

And just over two weeks later, on Oct. 12, the comet will pass just 44 million miles (71 million km) from Earth. 

These figures suggest that the comet might brighten to second or possibly even first magnitude and could develop a notable tail that could make for an eye-catching sight in the western evening sky during mid-October 2024.

It could also be a dud

Unfortunately, there is a caveat: calculations show that Tsuchinshan–ATLAS has an orbital eccentricity of 1.0001081, meaning that it is a "first-timer," coming directly from the Oort cloud, a spherical shell of icy space debris scientists theorize to be situated far beyond the outer limits of the solar system and thought to contain billions or even trillions of comets. 

Comets originating from the Oort cloud have never passed near to the sun before and their nuclei are coated with very volatile materials that vaporize far from the sun, creating short-lived surges in brightness. But as these comets get nearer to the sun, their brightening slows or even stops completely. 

Most — though admittedly not all — comets originating from the Oort cloud usually end up being duds. Typically, as these comets cross the orbit of Mars, their steady brightening trend starts to falter, similar to a marathon runner at the 20-mile mark; "hitting the wall" so to speak. In the case of a comet having emerged from the Oort cloud, a sudden decline in brightening may be signaling that it ultimately will end up underperforming. 

Not until mid-summer

Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS will not get to that point in its orbit until late July. If it then continues to steadily brighten beyond that time, then there's a good chance it will evolve into an eye-catching sight. But, more likely, if its brightening trend suddenly slows, or even comes to halt, all bets for a good show are off. Until then, all we can do is wait and watch. 

Unfortunately, we here in the Northern Hemisphere will not be able to check on the status of Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS during this summer because it will be situated much too far south to be accessible with telescopes. Those living in far-southerly locations, such as Australia, New Zealand and South America, however, will be able to track it in the morning sky before sunrise. 

We'll need to rely on reports from these parts of the globe to tell us whether the comet is on track to possibly becoming a bright object. 

Dusty reflections hold key to a good show

Another thing that could work in our favor is that the geometry of the comet relative to the sun and Earth, places it almost in-between the sun and Earth around Oct. 8, creating a phenomenon known as "forward scattering of sunlight." If the comet is particularly dusty, dust particles ejected from the comet nucleus would preferentially scatter sunlight in a forward direction and could cause a dramatic upsurge in the comet's brightness. 

To this end, there are two comets that Tsuchinshan–ATLAS might be compared to, which suddenly brightened-up thanks to forward scattering. The first was Comet Skjellerup–Maristany (C/1927 X1), which briefly became very bright in December 1927. Forward scattering of light on Dec. 18, 1927 allowed the comet to be seen during daylight by virtue of blocking the light of the sun with one's hand; it has since been ranked as among the greatest comets of all time. 

The other comet was Comet McNaught, also known as the Great Comet of 2007 and given the designation C/2006 P1, and was the brightest comet in over 40 years; easily visible to the naked eye for observers in the Southern Hemisphere in January and February 2007. At its brightest on Jan. 12, 2007, this comet appeared at least twice as bright as Venus and, like Skjellerup–Maristany, was visible worldwide in broad daylight next to the sun. This extreme brightness was also attributable to forward-scattering. 

Some calculations suggest that Tsuchinshan–ATLAS might become as brilliant as Venus around Oct. 8, 2024 — although in the sky — like the comets of 1927 and 2007 — it will also be very near to the position of the sun. In the days that follow, however, Tsuchinshan–ATLAS should sweep rapidly northward and become well-placed for viewing in the western sky by mid-October. Although it will now be fading as it recedes from both the sun and Earth, it hopefully will be bright enough to be well-seen with the naked-eye, perhaps accompanied by a notable tail as well. 

No guarantees

But there are no guarantees. In the past, there have been comets that seemingly promised a great show that failed to live up to expectations. Comet Kohoutek of 1973-74 is a good example. Conversely, there have been comets that did not look like they would perform well, that ended up unexpectedly becoming celestial showpieces. Comet NEOWISE surprised everyone during the summer of 2020 by putting on a good show. 

The legendary comet expert Dr. Fred Whipple perhaps said it best when he said:
"If you must bet, bet on a horse, not a comet!"

In the meantime, fingers crossed for Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS! Stay tuned to Space.com for future updates.

Originally posted on Space.com.

Scientists have identified a water-loss mechanism on Venus that could explain how the once water-rich world became completely parched.

In the newly identified process, linked to a previously overlooked molecule high in Venus' atmosphere, water escaped Venus at double the rate previously estimated. As faster water loss means less time is needed to boil away the planet's water reservoir, scientists say Venus may have harbored oceans — and potentially habitable conditions — for longer than previously thought before the drying process began.

"This would provide more time for possible life to arise," study co-author Eryn Cangi, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Colorado, wrote in The Conversation. "Our results don't mean oceans or life were definitely present, though — answering that question will require lots more science over many years."

Prior studies suggest that both Venus and Earth likely received similar amounts of water early in their history, mostly from water vapor-spewing volcanoes and icy comets that frequently bombarded the worlds. Estimates suggest Venus once had enough moisture to cover its surface in about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) of water. However, Venus receives far more sunlight than Earth, and previous research revealed this sunlight likely boiled away the planet's water reservoir by breaking atmospheric water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Once free, the lightweight hydrogen escaped into space via a process known as hydrodynamic escape, leaving Venus without one of the two ingredients needed to form water.

The process explains how most of Venus' water evaporated from its atmosphere, likely within the first billion years of the planet's history. However, it doesn't account for the last 330 feet (100 meters) worth of water that was likely left behind once the escape process stopped, soon after most hydrogen atoms exited Venus, the researchers of the new study said.

"As an analogy, say I dumped out the water in my water bottle. There would still be a few droplets left," study lead author Michael Chaffin, a research scientist at LASP, said in a statement. The remaining water can't have escaped from Venus the same way, but it must have been removed from the atmosphere relatively quickly to explain the hot, dry world we know today.

In the new study, the researchers suggested the remnant water was removed via a new mechanism known as HCO+ dissociative recombination (nicknamed DR). In this process, positively charged hydrogen, carbon and oxygen atoms combine with negatively charged electrons to produce carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen as a byproduct, after which the hydrogen escapes into space. Because water is the original source of the hydrogen reservoir on Venus, this process "effectively dries out the planet," the researchers said. Computer models of reactions in Venus' upper atmosphere show this mechanism closes the gap between the expected and observed water loss, according to the study, published Monday (May 6) in the journal Nature.

"One of the surprising conclusions of this work is that HCO+ should actually be among the most abundant ions in the Venus atmosphere," Chaffin said in the statement.

However, scientists have never observed this molecule on Venus. Previous missions to the planet weren't designed to detect it, but they did measure individual reactants that produce HCO+ in the atmosphere. 

None of the three upcoming missions to Venus are designed to detect the molecule either. NASA's VERITAS and the European Envision missions, both scheduled to launch in 2031, do not have the science instruments required to study hydrogen loss from Venus' upper atmosphere where the DR process occurs. NASA's DAVINCI probe, also scheduled to launch in 2031, will collect measurements about the pressure, temperature and winds of the atmosphere, but only below 43 miles (70 kilometers). 

Confirming the presence of HCO+, and nailing down this phase of Venus’ history, will therefore have to wait a long time.

An abundance of gases, including carbon and oxygen, are being stripped away from Venus' atmosphere, according to flyby data from Europe's BepiColombo space probe. This data was obtained as the Mercury-bound spacecraft flew past Venus, and could shed new light on the leaky atmosphere of our planetary neighbor. Down the line, the findings could help scientists catalog the makeup of Venus' fragile magnetic environment as well.

Unlike Earth, a planet with an intrinsic magnetic field that protects its atmosphere from escaping into the depths of space, Venus does not possess its own, stable magnetic field. That is because its cooler interior cannot slosh around molten material, a swirling necessary to create and sustain a magnetic field. Rather, sunlight battering on the amber-hued orb charges up its atmospheric atoms, which then create electric currents that produce an unstable, sunlight-dependent magnetosphere.

In August 2021, BepiColombo flew through this weak, comet-shaped magnetosphere for 90 minutes to slow down and adjust its course while heading toward its ultimate target, Mercury. Scientists analyzing data from the spacecraft's fleeting visit, however, found some valuable Venusian information. Charged particles, or ions, appeared to be escaping the planet due to sunlight accelerating molecules in the atmosphere to extremely high speeds. Those speeds were high enough, in fact, that the ions even escaped the planet's gravity and flowed out into space.

Related: Uranus and Neptune aren't made of what we thought, new study hints

"These are heavy ions that are usually slow moving, so we are still trying to understand the mechanisms that are at play," Lina Hadid, a researcher at the Plasma Physics Laboratory in France who led the new analysis, said in a statement.

Venus' thick, hellish atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide, but also holds fewer amounts of nitrogen and other trace gases. Scientists previously knew tiny amounts of oxygen lofted in Venus' night-side and, last November, a different team of researchers detected the molecule on the planet's day-side too. The latter team further concluded that Venus' oxygen concentration drops in tandem with decreasing solar radiation.

Investigating the loss of these molecules and their escape mechanisms "is crucial to understand how the planet's atmosphere has evolved and how it has lost all its water," study co-author Dominique Delcourt, who is also a researcher at the Plasma Physics Laboratory, said in the same statement.

BepiColombo is nearing the end of its seven-year journey and is expected to reach Mercury in late 2025. Meanwhile, a fleet of robotic visitors are scheduled to visit Venus in the coming decade. Europe's Envision spacecraft aims to launch in 2031 while NASA's DAVINCI, originally slated for a 2029 launch, was delayed to 2031.

The resurrected VERITAS mission is now scheduled to launch no earlier than 2031 as well, although team members are still advocating for an earlier launch in November 2029.

This research is described in a paper published Friday (April 12) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Originally posted on Space.com.

As the solar system's planets rove around the sun, sometimes a few will appear to line up in the sky. But have all eight planets ever truly aligned?

The answer depends on how generous you are with the definition of "align" for the solar system's planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

To start with, the orbits of the planets are all tilted to different degrees with respect to the sun's equator. This means that, when planets appear to line up in the sky, in reality they are likely not positioned in a straight line in 3D space, Arthur Kosowsky, an astrophysicist at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science.

"The concept of planetary alignment is more about the visual appearance from our perspective on Earth rather than any significant physical alignment in space," Nikhita Madhanpall, an astrophysicist at Wits University in South Africa, told Live Science.

A planetary conjunction is when two or more planets appear close together from our perspective on Earth. It's important to note that the planets are never actually close together. Even when two planets appear lined up to a person on Earth, they are still extremely far apart in space, The Planetary Society notes.

Related: Which planet is closest to Earth? (Hint: There's more than 1 right answer.)

The definition of how close the planets can appear to be considered aligned is not well defined, Wayne Barkhouse, an astrophysicist at the University of North Dakota, told Live Science. Any such definition would involve "angular degrees," the way astronomers measure the apparent distance between two celestial objects in the sky.

If you measured the distance around the circle of the entire horizon, that would equal 360 degrees. To give an idea of the horizon's enormity, the full moon appears only half a degree across, according to Las Cumbres Observatory in Goleta, California.

In the book "Mathematical Astronomy Morsels" (Willmann-Bell, 1997), Jean Meeus, a Belgian meteorologist and amateur astronomer, calculated that the three innermost planets — Mercury, Venus and Earth — "line up within 3.6 degrees on average every 39.6 years," Barkhouse said.

Lining up more planets takes time. According to Meeus, "all eight planets will line up within 3.6 degrees, for example, every 396 billion years," Barkhouse said. "Which means it has never occurred and will not occur, since the sun will transform into a white dwarf in roughly 6 billion years from now. During this process, the sun will become a red giant and expand in size to swallow both Mercury and Venus, and probably the Earth as well. Thus, only five planets will remain in our solar system."

The chances are worse for all eight planets aligning within 1 degree of sky. According to Meeus, "this will occur, on average, every 13.4 trillion years," Barkhouse said. In comparison, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.

If you consider the eight planets aligned if they are in the same 180-degree-wide patch of sky, the next time that will happen is May 6, 2492, according to Christopher Baird, an associate professor of physics at West Texas A&M University. The last time the eight planets were grouped within 30 degrees was Jan. 1, 1665, and the next time will be March 20, 2673, according to the National Solar Observatory's facility at Sacramento Peak, California.

Madhanpall noted that planetary alignments have virtually no significant physical effects on Earth. "The only impact to life on Earth during an alignment is the wonderful display visible in the sky," Barkhouse added. "There is no danger of enhanced earthquakes or anything like that. The change in the gravitational force that the Earth will experience due to any planetary alignment is negligible."

This Thursday (Feb. 22), Venus and Mars will appear side by side in the predawn sky, and if you rise early, you can spot this planetary dance with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars.

During the seemingly close encounter, called a planetary conjunction, Venus and Mars will come within about half a degree of each other. Venus, one of the brightest objects in Earth's sky, will easily outshine Mars. While Venus will shine at magnitude -3.9, Mars will reach just magnitude 1.3, according to In The Sky. (The brightest objects in the sky have the lowest numbers on this scale, with the sun shining at magnitude -27, according to NASA.)

Because Mars will be harder to see in the light of dawn, the best way to view this conjunction is with a pair of good binoculars. However, you should still be able to see the event with your unaided eyes. Observers in the Northern Hemisphere will be able to see the two planets shine together in the east-southeast from around one hour before sunrise, with Mars about the width of a full moon below Venus, thus forming somewhat of a cosmic colon in the sky.

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2024

Although the planets appear close together, they look that way only from our perspective on Earth, of course. On Feb. 22, Venus will be 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth, and Mars will be 208 million miles (335 million km) from our planet. In other words, the two seemingly side-by-side planets will actually be more than 100 million miles apart from each other.

Conjunctions are fascinating events, but they are not rare in our solar system. There will be three other planetary conjunctions in 2024: Jupiter and Uranus (April 20), Mars and Uranus (July 16), and Mars and Jupiter (Aug. 15).

Venus briefly flashed a shimmering green light in the night sky above Sweden, new footage reveals. The rarely seen phenomenon is almost identical to the ethereal green flashes that are occasionally seen around the sun during sunrises and sunsets. 

Photographer Peter Rosén captured the colorful flash coming from one of our closest planetary neighbors while he was watching Venus rise above the horizon in Stockholm in the early hours of Jan. 8, Spaceweather.com reported. 

The bright flash, which lasted for around a second, was an "unexpected bonus" that added to what was already an awe-inspiring experience, Rosén told Spaceweather.com.

Similar green flashes are occasionally seen coming from the sun as the sun rises above an ocean horizon. The light shows are caused by light from the celestial objects being refracted, or split apart, as it passes through our planet's atmosphere. 

Related: 10 bizarre phenomena that lit up the sky (and their scientific explanations)

Visible light is made up of different wavelengths of colored light, which collectively give the rays a white color. But when light from the sun shines through Earth's atmosphere, the individual wavelengths get partially refracted by gas molecules. This happens all the time: For example, the daytime sky appears blue because blue wavelengths scatter more than any other wavelength. 

However, with the right conditions, such as clear skies, light from the sun and nearby planets can fully separate, especially when they are positioned near the horizon because the light has to travel through more of the atmosphere to reach the observer. 

When this happens, shorter wavelengths of light, such as blues and violets, are scattered the most, while longer wavelengths, like reds, oranges and yellows, are more readily absorbed by molecules in the atmosphere. As a result, mid-length green wavelengths are sometimes the only colors that reach an observer. However, the angle has to be just right for this to happen, which is why it only appears to the observer as a brief flash.

In the recent footage of Venus, green is the most prominent color that flashes from the planet. But if you look closely you can also see yellow, orange, red and blue light shimmer around as well.

In some circumstances, ice crystals can also refract sunlight in the atmosphere to create rainbow-colored clouds and halos of light around the sun or moon. The same effect can also create rainbow rings around objects as light is refracted by large grains of floating pollen.

Green flashes have been spotted coming from Venus a handful of times before. Similar green flashes have also been captured in images of Mercury and the moon.

But unlike green flashes around the sun, which appear more frequently in the clear air above the ocean, these light shows are more commonly seen through extremely cold air, which magnifies the effect. This means planetary flashes are not so tightly constrained to the horizon, according to Spaceweather.com.

If you ask an astronomer which planet is closest to Earth, you'd probably expect to get a single, simple answer in response. And if you were paying attention at school, you'd probably be reasonably confident you could guess which one of the seven other planets in our solar system it is. 

So what is the closest planet to us? Turns out there isn't just one right answer — there are technically three, depending on how you've phrased the question and when you've asked it. 

The best way to explain why this is so contentious is to go through the different possible questions and answer them, one at a time. 

Which planet gets closest to Earth?

The answer to this particular question is straightforward — Venus. At its closest proximity to Earth, the hellish planet is only around 24 million miles (38 million kilometers) away from our planet, and no other planet gets closer to us. 

Using this logic, our next nearest neighbor is Mars, which can get to within 34 million miles (54.7 million km) of our planet, followed by Mercury, which is around 48 million miles (77.2 million km) from Earth at its closest point to us. 

Related: How many times has Earth orbited the sun?

However, we're very rarely near our closest point to any of these planets, and all three of them (as well as Earth) are constantly orbiting the sun at different speeds, meaning the distances between our blue marble and each of them are constantly changing over time. As a result, most astronomers do not find this answer very satisfying. 

Which planet is closest to Earth right now?

For this question, the answer can be either Mercury, Venus or Mars, depending on where each planet is on its orbital path compared to Earth.

For example, if Venus and Mercury are located near their farthest points from Earth on the other side of the sun and Mars is near its closest point to Earth, then Mars would be the closest planet to us at that point. But if Mars is at its farthest point from Earth, and Mercury and Venus are near their closest points, then Venus would be the closest planet to us. 

But the answer to this question changes all the time, which also doesn't make it a very good way of determining our closest neighbor. 

For example, when this article was written (January 2024), the closest planet to Earth was Mercury. But in around eight months, Venus will be the closest planet to us, and in another two months or so, Mars will have surpassed Venus as our closest neighbor. However, less than a month later Venus will have wrestled back the title. 

You can keep track of this yourself using this simulator from TheSkyLive.com. 

Which planet is closest to Earth on average?

This is where things get really interesting. 

If you look online for a list of planets' average distances from Earth, you will get results saying that Venus is much closer to Earth on average than Mercury or Mars. For example, ThePlanets.org lists Venus' average distance to Earth as around 25.7 million miles (41.4 million km), compared with 57 million miles (91.7 million km) for Mercury and 48.6 million miles (78.3 million km) for Mars. 

Related: Why do the planets in the solar system orbit on the same plane?

But these lists are wrong because they are based on flawed assumptions, Tom Stockman, a research and development engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told Live Science. To get these numbers, people have simply calculated the average distance between the radius of each planet's orbital distance from the sun, he said. But this does not take into account the planets' relative positions to one another during their orbits — it only tells you how far apart they orbit the sun on average, Stockman said.

Instead, the correct way to work out the average distances between planets is by using a point-circle method (PCM), which calculates an average of all the distances between each point on both orbits, Stockman said. 

In 2019, Stockman co-wrote an article in Physics Today that pointed out this basic error and shared the true average distances between each of the planets based on a PCM model — which the authors  named the whirly-dirly corollary after an episode of the cartoon "Rick and Morty." This revealed that Venus actually has an average distance of 105.6 million miles (169.9 million km) from Earth, while Mars is around 158.1 million miles (254.4 million km) away on average. However, Mercury is only around 96.6 million miles (155.5 million km) from Earth on average.

However, these averages still don't paint the whole picture because they only represent distance and not time. Therefore, Stockman and his colleagues ran their simulations for 10,000 years to see how long, on average, each planet was closest to Earth. This revealed that Mars spent roughly 17% of the time as Earth's closest neighbor and Venus spent roughly 36% of the time holding the title. But the winner was Mercury, which was closest to Earth for roughly 47% of the time, making it our true closest neighbor on average.

Mercury is our closest companion because it is the closest to the sun and has the smallest orbit, which means it is more often on the same side of the sun as Earth, and even when it's not, it's never that far away. Meanwhile, Venus and Mars spend long periods of time much farther away from Earth.

For the same reason, it turns out that not only is Mercury our closest neighbor on average, but it is also the closest average neighbor of all six other planets in our solar system, the whirly-dirly corollary revealed.

Before the whirly-dirly corollary, other astronomers had probably already figured all this out, meaning it wasn't "entirely unknown," Stockman said. "I think most people that knew, like me at first, just treated this as a fun little fact to talk about at parties," he added. 

Ice "clouds" may form briefly in Venus' hellish atmosphere, satellite images and computer models suggest.

In a study published late last year in the journal Advancing Earth and Space Sciences, researchers found that both water and carbon dioxide could condense into ice particles high in the Venusian atmosphere. These ice particles, in turn, could help the scorching world hang on to its water.

Venus, the hottest planet in the solar system, is infamous for its hellish and inhospitable surface, where temperatures are around 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius) — hot enough to melt lead. But at an altitude of around 75 miles (120 kilometers) above the planet's volcano-strewn surface, temperatures can drop as low as minus 298 F (minus 183 C), according to the study.

Related: Oxygen detected in Venus' hellish atmosphere

The computer models suggested that at these temperatures, liquid water can condense into nanosize crystals of water ice, which then gather on smoke particles in the Venusian atmosphere in a process called nucleation. From these cloud seeds, fully formed clouds can develop. If the temperature drops below minus 298, carbon dioxide ice crystals then cover the water ice particles, making the clouds bigger.

"Since the atmosphere of Venus is mainly made of carbon dioxide, these carbon dioxide crystals grow and then sediment rapidly in the thin atmosphere," the authors wrote in the paper.

This process may make the upper mesosphere, or middle layer of Venus' atmosphere, "supersaturated" with both amorphous solid water and crystalline carbon dioxide ice, the study authors proposed. That means tiny water ice cloud seeds may continually  encircle Venus, while short-lived carbon dioxide ice clouds would occasionally form.

The so-called Venusian mesospheric clouds may  act as a "cold trap," or a layer of the atmosphere that is substantially colder than the ones above and below it. They may also help to redistribute smoke particles through Venus' atmosphere, as well as help the planet hang on to its water content by preventing water particles from escaping into space.

In theory, the wispy carbon dioxide clouds over Venus could be visible if they were to get big enough to scatter detectable amounts of light.

"Venusian mesospheric clouds should be observable by contemporary satellite instruments, although their short lifetime means that the probability of detection is small," the team wrote. "If we were lucky enough to see one of these short-lived sporadic clouds, it would look a bit like mares' tail [cirrus] cloud[s] on Earth."

Every year, we learn more about the intricacies of the solar system, and 2023 has been no different. This year, scientists shed more light on our cosmic neighborhood with some intriguing discoveries. From shrinking planets and new moons to an icy supervolcano and mysterious spots, here are the 10 wildest things we learned about the solar system in 2023. 

Mercury is shrinking 

Starting with the planet closest to the sun, Mercury, an October study revealed that the solar system's tiniest planet might be getting even smaller.

Experts have long known that Mercury has shrunk significantly since it first formed. Giant cracks, known as scarps, on the planet's surface were created as the planet contracted over long periods of cooling. 

Scientists originally thought these scarps were billions of years old, but the new research showed that some were just 300 million years old, which suggests the planet has been shrinking for most of its life — and it could still be happening today. 

This year, scientists also discovered that salty glaciers in some of Mercury's craters could provide the necessary conditions for some extreme life-forms to thrive.

Oxygen found on Venus 

Moving farther from the sun, researchers announced in November that oxygen had been detected in Venus' atmosphere for the second time, confirming that the element is present on the hellish planet. 

The thin layer of molecular oxygen (unbonded oxygen atoms) was spotted by NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, a telescope attached to a large plane that flew above most forms of interference in Earth's atmosphere between 2014 and 2022.

However, this oxygen is not a sign of life on Venus. Instead, researchers suspect the gas is created as solar radiation breaks down carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide molecules in the atmosphere. This oxygen would also be useless to future human colonists because it is not breathable and is found in low concentrations.

This year, scientists also discovered that Venus has thousands more volcanoes than we previously realized and that a majority of them could still be active.

The moon is older than we thought 

Closer to home, a study published in October revealed that the moon may be at least 40 million years older than we previously thought.

Researchers examined tiny impact crystals, known as zircon crystals, within lunar rock samples brought back by NASA's Apollo 17 mission. The new analysis revealed that these crystals,which were left by a colossal collision between Earth and a Mars-size planet that birthed the moon, were older than similar crystals found in other lunar samples.

"These crystals are the oldest known solids that formed after the giant impact," the researchers wrote, and they act as "an anchor for lunar chronology."

This year, astronomers also detected a mysterious heat-emitting blob on the moon's far side and spotted a separate chunk of the moon orbiting Earth.

Mars is spinning faster and faster

One of the biggest stories to come from Mars this year is that the Red Planet's spin has been getting quicker every year, and scientists don't know why.   

Data from NASA's InSight mission shows that Mars' rotation is accelerating at a rate of 4 milliarcseconds per year, which means its days are growing slightly shorter. (A milliarcsecond is one one-thousandth of an arcsecond, which is a unit of angularity.)

Two leading theories explain the speed-up. The first is that ice accumulation at the planet's poles is causing a slight change in how its mass is distributed, and the second is a phenomenon called postglacial rebound, where landmasses rise up after millennia buried under ice.

This year, scientists also solved the mystery of the planet's largest-ever "marsquake" and calculated the minimum number of people needed to start a Martian colony.

Jupiter has a dozen new moons 

This year, scientists confirmed the existence of 12 new moons around Jupiter, bringing the planet's satellite count to 92. At the time, this set a new solar system record.

The newly discovered Jovian moons are small, ranging from 0.6 to 2 miles (1 to 3.2 kilometers) wide, and most of them have wide orbits — nine of the 12 moons take more than 550 days to orbit Jupiter.

The moons were discovered in 2021 and 2022 but were just confirmed this year by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

This year, NASA's Juno spacecraft also discovered organic compounds on the surface of Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. The molecules likely came from the moon's subsurface ocean, hinting that it could sustain life.

But Saturn has even more moons

If you thought Jupiter gained lots of moons this year, just wait until you get a load of Saturn's new satellites. This year, scientists officially added 62 moons to the ringed planet's roster, bringing its total to 145 and setting a new record that is unlikely to be broken by Jupiter again. 

Some of the new moons were just 1.6 miles (2.5 km) wide. But all of the newly detected satellites are "irregular moons," meaning they follow distant, elliptical orbits around their host planet and often move in retrograde, meaning in the opposite direction of Saturn's rotation. Some are also clumped together, suggesting they were once a single body that broke apart.

This year, scientists also spotted a key organic compound shooting out of Saturn's icy ocean moon Enceladus, and researchers also worked out that the astronomer who discovered Saturn's largest moon, Titan, was probably nearsighted.  

Polar vortex spotted on Uranus 

Moving into the outer planets, new images of Uranus showed a gigantic "polar vortex" swirling around the ice giant's north pole, suggesting the planet's atmosphere is not as inert as we previously believed.

A polar vortex is a swirling ring of hot or cold air that circles a planet's polar region. These vortices have been spotted on Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. And in 1986, NASA's Voyager 2 probe spotted a polar vortex around Uranus' south pole on its journey out of the solar system.

The swirling rings are thought to be caused by high-altitude atmospheric jet streams, although the mechanisms differ from planet to planet.

Earlier this year, scientists also spotted a polar vortex on the sun for the first time.

Neptune keeps growing mysterious spots 

This year, astronomers captured the first, clear image of one of Neptune's mysterious dark spots from Earth and photographed a never-before-seen bright spot at the same time.

Temporary dark spots have been documented on the solar system's most distant planet since 1989, when Voyager 2 spotted one as it passed by. Scientists think the dark spots are probably gigantic storms, like Jupiter's "Great Red Spot," but they are unsure why the spots appear so dark. 

The recent bright spot has never been seen before and lasted only a few weeks, so its origins are even more mysterious. But the different spots are likely linked, researchers said.

This year, astronomers also noticed that all of Neptune's clouds had suddenly vanished. The disappearing act is likely linked to a peak in solar activity as the sun reaches the explosive peak in its roughly 11-year solar cycle, known as the solar maximum. 

Pluto has an icy supervolcano 

Demoted planet Pluto has been hiding a gigantic cryovolcano the size of Yellowstone's supervolcano, an October study revealed.

Cryovolcanoes, also known as ice volcanoes, are simply volcanoes that erupt with cryomagma — ice, water and various gases — instead of molten rock. They've been found in several places across the solar system, including the dwarf planet Ceres and at the heart of explosive comets, such as the "devil comet."

Pluto's newly discovered volcano, named Kiladze Caldera, was originally pegged as a crater in images captured by NASA's New Horizons mission. But after taking a second look at the data, scientists detected traces of cryomagama around the depression, which is evidence that it has erupted multiple times.

Scientists don't know if it's still active, but if it is, it could produce enough cryomagma to cover Los Angeles.

Planet Nine might not exist (but it also might) 

Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet that is rumored to exist somewhere in the outer reaches of the solar system.

The Planet Nine hypothesis arose when astronomers detected gravitational anomalies in the Kuiper Belt — a group of comets and asteroids beyond the orbit of Neptune. These anomalies suggest that an invisible planet up to 10 times the size of Earth is lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt.

But in a preprint paper uploaded in September, scientists proposed that these gravitational anomalies could be explained by an alternative theory of gravity, known as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). 

MOND suggests that entities toward the edge of the Milky Way, such as the solar system, experience a greater gravitational tug from our galaxy's supermassive black hole heart than traditional gravity allows. Therefore, the Kuiper Belt object may be tugged away by our galaxy and not an elusive planet. However, MOND is not a universally accepted theory, so for now, our best guess is that Planet Nine does exist. 

When you're standing on Earth's surface, it's easy to forget that our planet is hurtling around the sun at more than 67,000 mph (107,800 km/h). And it's even easier to forget that there are seven other planets also making their way around our home star at similar breakneck speeds, or that all eight have been ceaselessly circling the solar system for billions of years. 

But what might really blow your mind is finding out how many trips around the sun each planet has under its belt. This may seem like a tricky thing to calculate, but because the planets' orbits have remained largely unaltered for most of their existence, all it takes is a bit of basic math.

Related: What's the maximum number of planets that could orbit the sun?

The solar system was born around 4.6 billion years ago, when the sun began to form from a cloud of dust left behind by prior stellar explosions. Around 4.59 billion years ago, the giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — were born. And around 4.5 billion years ago, the smaller, rocky planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — took shape, according to The Planetary Society.

But when the planets were born, their orbits around the sun were not the same as they are today (especially those of the giant planets). For around 100 million years after the first planets formed, there was a "dynamical instability" among them, which resulted in a gravitational tug-of-war between these large bodies and caused the rest of the outer solar system's planetary material, and even some emerging protoplanets, to be catapulted out of the solar system, Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory in France and an expert on planetary systems, told Live Science in an email. 

However, once all of the planets had emerged and finished jostling with one another for their positions, they settled into consistent, stable orbits that haven't changed much since.

"For 98% to 99% of the solar system's lifetime, the planets' orbits have been nice and stable," Raymond said. As a result, you can use the planets' current orbital dynamics to make a pretty accurate guess at how many trips they have made around the sun, he added.

Take Earth, for example. Our planet takes a year to orbit the sun and has existed for 4.5 billion years, so it has taken roughly 4.5 billion trips around the solar system. 

However, the number of total orbits varies greatly among the other planets because their years are either shorter or longer than Earth's.

Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, takes only 88 days (or roughly 0.24 years, based on a year with 365.25 days) to travel around the sun once. So, over the past 4.5 billion years, it has completed around 18.7 billion solar orbits. But Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun, takes around 60,190 days (or 164.7 years) to complete an orbit, which means it has managed only about 27.9 million trips around the sun during its 4.59 billion years of existence. That means Mercury has orbited the sun around 18.7 billion times more than Neptune has.

Here is the full list of the planets, their year length and their total number of trips around the sun:

These sound like impressive numbers (and they are) but most of the planets could potentially double their number of orbits in their remaining lifetimes. 

In around 4.5 billion years, the sun will have swollen outward to reach Earth's orbit and transition into a red dwarf star, which will destroy Mercury, Venus and Earth. The other planets may live on for a time if they are not burned up but their orbits will likely be majorly altered.

Venus' atmosphere is notoriously hellish. Its air is corrosive and hot enough to melt lead. Its billowing clouds are poisonous to humans. Sometimes, it rains acid. But researchers just discovered that, sandwiched between layers of toxic gas, this inhospitable atmosphere contains a thin layer of molecular oxygen.

Historically, Venus has received far less scientific attention than Earth's other neighbor, Mars. Recent reports that the organic compound phosphine may (or may not) exist in the Venusian clouds, however, have sparked new interest in studying the planet.

The new measurements come courtesy of NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747 that the agency retrofitted with a 2.7-meter (8.9 feet) infrared telescope. A team of German astrophysicists pored through data from SOFIA, focusing on 17 positions in Venus' atmosphere, on both the planet's dayside and nightside. They detected molecular oxygen — a gas composed of nonbonded oxygen atoms — in all of them. The results were published Nov. 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

But that doesn't mean astronauts would be able to breathe oxygen on Venus just as they would on Earth. Molecular oxygen is distinct from the oxygen that we breathe on our planet: Whereas breathable oxygen consists of two bonded oxygen atoms, creating the molecule O2, molecular oxygen is a soup of single, free-floating oxygen atoms. If we tried to breathe it, it would react too easily with the tissues in our lungs and wouldn't make it to our bloodstream.

Oxygen had been previously observed on the nightside of Venus, but this marks the first time researchers have detected it in the day-lit regions as well. The researchers suspect that the molecular oxygen builds up as the sun's heat breaks down carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide molecules. Winds high in the atmosphere then whisk it over to the planet's nightside, where the free oxygen atoms gradually react with other elements.

The molecular oxygen layer also probably has a slight cooling effect on the upper layers of Venus' atmosphere. This modest cooling isn't enough to offset the planet's runaway greenhouse effect, but it does hint at Venus' milder, more pleasant past.

The finding also highlights how much scientists still have to learn about Earth's hostile "twin." With two upcoming NASA missions, as well as one helmed by the European Space Agency, Venus is about to receive a lot more attention, which may mean more discoveries in the near future.

If you're willing to get up early this Thursday (Nov. 9), you can catch one of the most delightful celestial sights of the year: the crescent moon "smiling" at Venus.

During this close conjunction, the moon, arguably in its most delicate and beautiful phase of the month, will appear close to a very bright Venus but will be oriented so it resembles a smiley face.

However, you'll have to rise early; it will be visible in the eastern sky starting at about 3 a.m. across North America. There will be around a two-hour window to see the moon and Venus before sunrise, with the pair climbing higher into the east-southeastern predawn sky.

The moon, in its waning crescent phase, will be just 15% lit during the event. Just 1 degree — about the width of an outstretched finger — to its upper right will be Venus, shining at a brilliant magnitude of -4.3. (Lower magnitudes are brighter.) These, the second and third brightest objects in the sky after the sun, will be easy to see with the naked eye, though a pair of good binoculars will reveal details on the lunar surface.

The duo will be so close that they'll fit in the same field of view in a small telescope, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

You'll probably notice that the unlit portion of the moon — in this case, the other 85% — is also slightly illuminated. That's "Earthshine," the sun's light reflected off Earth's clouds and ice caps back onto the moon, which partly illuminates its night side.

For North America, this brilliant meet-up is set to be merely a lovely conjunction. However, from a narrow path across some of the planet, it will be possible to see Venus briefly disappear behind the moon. That so-called occultation is possible because the moon is so close to Earth that its position in the sky varies by up to 2 degrees worldwide, according to In-the-sky.org.

The path of visibility for the occultation will lie across parts of Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard (Norway), Europe (not including Spain and Portugal), western Russia and central northern Africa. However, for some observers, the occultation will occur during daylight, so viewers there will need a telescope to see this game of celestial hide-and-seek.

We've all wondered whether we're alone in the universe, and with potentially habitable planets, strange space signals and UFO hearings hitting the headlines, it's starting to feel like we're on the cusp of a major extraterrestrial discovery. But what's the best scientific evidence we've found for the existence of alien life?

The sobering reality is that there isn't any yet. There's no scientific evidence for aliens in the declassified UFO videos, in mutilated cows whose injuries are blamed on extraterrestrial activities or in purported alien bodies. Nor is there any such evidence in the formal academic research. Live Science checked in with experts to make sure.

"There's just no evidence right now," Professor Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir" (Crown, 2020), told Live Science.

Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics and exoplanetary science at the University of Cambridge, gave a similar response, saying, "I don't think we have clear evidence just yet of any kind for alien life."

There is, however, good reason to hold out hope that the evidence will eventually come, even if it isn't personally delivered by a little green man.

Related: What would colors look like on other planets?

Madhusudhan told Live Science that "there are hints here and there" and "there is evidence for habitable conditions." In other words, there are signs that certain planets and moons could harbor life, but we haven't found evidence of life in these places yet.

There may be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in our galaxy alone. Scientists consider planets capable of hosting life if they sit in the so-called habitable zone, the distance from a star where it's possible for a rocky planet to have liquid water on the surface, an essential ingredient for life on Earth. Planets and moons outside of the habitable zone aren't necessarily inhospitable to life either. For example, Jupiter's moon Europa isn't in the sun's habitable zone, but has a saltwater ocean beneath its icy crust that may be able to host life.

Researchers are looking inside and outside of our solar system for signs of life. Madhusudhan led a study, published in October 2023 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, that detected hints of an ocean on a planet called K2-18 b, located more than 100 light-years away. Their data also suggested "potential signs" of dimethyl sulfide, a chemical that, as far as we know, is produced only by life on Earth.

"That is very tentative," he said. "We don't know if it is present or not, but we do see it in the data at some level."

That potential sign of alien life will be subject to further studies and may be refuted. Regardless, Madhusudhan said he wouldn't be surprised if we found evidence for extraterrestrial microbial life within the next decade. "I'd be very surprised if there is no life out there of any kind," he added.

Seager believes we'd confirm the existence of alien life only with sample-return missions — collecting samples from another planet or moon and bringing them back to Earth for study, in-situ measurements or "incredibly futuristic" technology, like a solar gravitational lens telescope, a theoretical instrument that would use the sun's gravity to magnify light from distant planets.

"With all the tools we have now, or that we could build with enough money, it's sample return, because I don't see anything else being definitive," Seager said.

Seager was part of a 2020 study published in the journal Nature Astronomy that reported the "apparent presence" of phosphine gas — a potential signature of life — on Venus. The research has been debated in the scientific community since.

Researchers will argue about whether potential life signatures detected on other planets are real, and then whether those signatures are accurate, and then whether those signatures are actually caused by life, which they currently won't be able to prove without collecting samples, according to Seager.

However, she's confident that scientists will find more signs of water and oceans that could indicate habitability, as well as gases that might be due to life. "I think that's enough to keep this generation's long search moving forward," she said.

Keep in mind that space is incredibly vast. It would take humans more than a million years to visit K2-18 b with traditional rocket propulsion. Even sending our fastest probe to the nearest known exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b, would take thousands of years. The planets and moons within our solar system are right on our doorstep by comparison, with probe travel times ranging from some years to mere months.

If you're willing to rise early, you may spot a beautiful sight in the eastern sky on Tuesday, Oct. 10.

About three hours before sunrise, the bright planet Venus and a 17%-lit crescent moon will appear just 5 degrees from each other, and the pair will be easily visible to the naked eye. Venus will rise about half an hour after the moon. You can get the exact rise times for your location on timeanddate.com's Night Sky Map & Planets Visible Tonight page.

It will also be possible to see a couple of bright stars around the crescent moon and Venus. The moon will hang in front of the constellation Leo, the lion. It will be between the two brightest stars in Leo: Algieba and Regulus.

Sometimes called the Lion's Heart, Regulus is the 21st-brightest star in the sky. Located about 79 light-years from the solar system, it's part of the sickle of Leo, the head and front of the lion, which resembles a backward question mark. 

Related: Venus: Facts about the hellish planet next door

There are six stars in the sickle, with Regulus at the bottom. The fourth star, visible on the other side of the crescent moon, will be Algieba, which is about 130 light-years from the solar system and one of the clearest double stars in the night sky, according to Astronomy Now. Viewing Algieba through a good small telescope will split it into a pair of golden stars.

The crescent moon will move away from Venus and the bright stars as it continues its orbit, but equally beautiful sights await. 

On the mornings of Wednesday, Oct. 11 and Thursday, Oct. 12, it will be possible to glimpse the ever-slimmer crescent moon just 10% and 5% illuminated, respectively, as it approaches its new-moon phase, when it will eclipse the sun on Saturday, Oct. 14 as seen throughout the Americas.

The thick, acid-rich clouds of Venus continue to shroud the planet next door in mystery.

Scientists have long-debated whether intriguing light flashes recorded by previous Venus missions are evidence of lightning strikes on the planet. If those flashes really represent lightning, future missions to the windy planet need to be designed such that they are strong enough to survive the bolts, which are known to damage electronics here on Earth.

Moreover, lightning on Venus means Earth's cosmic neighbor would join the rare planetary club whose current members — Earth, Jupiter and Saturn — host lightning bolts in their clouds. Such flickers of light would also be unique on the world in that they'd exist despite Venus' clouds lacking water, a substance considered key in creating electrical charges. 

Related: Mirror-like exoplanet that 'shouldn't exist' is the shiniest world ever discovered

So, scientists are excited by the possibility of lightning on Venus — but the evidence so far has been circumstantial at best.

And now, a new study suggests lightning might be extremely rare on the planet. Instead, it offers the possibility that meteors burning up high in Venus' atmosphere are very likely responsible for the detected light flashes.

Assuming there'd be a similar number of meteors raining on Venus as seen on Earth, the team estimated the number of flashes these space rocks should cause. The researchers then compared that data to the flashes recorded in the planet's atmosphere by two surveys: The Mt. Bigelow Observatory in Arizona and Japan's Venus orbiter Akatsuki, which has been circling our planetary neighbor since 2015.

Results showed that space rocks burning up about 62 miles (100 km) from Venus' surface "may be responsible for most or even possibly all of the observed flashes," according to the study. "Lightning thus does not seem like a threat to missions that pass through or even linger within the clouds."

Data from previous Venus missions by the U.S., Europe and the former Soviet Union included signals that scientists have long interpreted as lightning strikes, and suspected they even occur more frequently than those that flash on Earth.

In the recent past, however, both the Saturn-bound Cassini and the sun-bound Parker Solar Probe "searched for but failed to find radio signals from lightning" on Venus, researchers wrote in the new study.

Studies like this are important for planning future missions to Venus, an effort that is widely considered long overdue, especially as the recent detection of a possible active volcano on the planet's surface shows the world may still be geologically active.

If lightning strikes are really a risk, probes that attempt to descend to the surface of Venus or those that will float for months in its thick atmosphere will need protection while gathering valuable data.

While there may still be lightning at the surface caused by volcanic eruptions, the new study finds that overall, it is not of significant concern to future missions.

Future probes that descend quickly through Venus' atmosphere are safe, researchers say. That includes NASA's DAVINCI (short for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging), which is scheduled to plunge through the planet's atmosphere in early 2030s.

For long-lived aerial platforms that hover in the planet's clouds for about 100 Earth days or more, the study finds that a lightning strike is more likely to occur if the probe is within 56 miles (90 km) from the surface.

"However, perhaps such a moderately distant strike would seem more exciting than dangerous," according to the new study.

This research is described in a paper published Aug. 25 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. 

This edited article is republished from Space.com under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

You may have noticed in recent weeks that the planet Venus has slipped from the post-sunset sky, slimming into a crescent shape as it drops from view. Its reign as the bright "Evening Star" in 2023 is over, as a relatively rare celestial phenomenon takes shape.

On Aug. 13, Venus will appear to be between Earth and the sun, which astronomers describe as being at inferior conjunction. It's purely a line-of-sight phenomenon, and from Earth's point of view it can only happen to two planets in the solar system — Mercury and Venus — both of which are inferior planets, which means they are closer to the sun than Earth. The outer planets, which lie farther from the sun than Earth, are called superior planets by astronomers. 

Another way of understanding Venus at inferior conjunction is to think of it as in its "new" phase, much as a new moon sits between Earth and the sun. Just like a new moon, Venus at inferior conjunction will be virtually invisible to us on Earth. On Aug. 13, the planet will be completely lost in the sun's glare and impossible to observe. This phenomenon happens once every 19 months, according to EarthSky, because Venus' orbit around the sun takes just 225 days (compared with Earth's 365). 

As Venus has been approaching inferior conjunction, it's been thinning to a slim crescent, just as the moon becomes a waning crescent on its way to becoming a new moon. Appearing closer to the sun with each passing day, Venus has been sinking lower to the horizon in the post-sunset western sky. As well as losing latitude, it's also been losing light. As the angle between it and the sun has been reducing, on Earth we've been able to see less and less sunlight reflected from Venus. 

Venus won't appear to cross the sun's disk on Aug. 13, instead passing just 7.7 degrees to its south and be just 0.9% illuminated, according to BBC Sky At Night magazine. The moment when the planet appears to pass across the disk of the sun as seen from Earth is called a transit of Venus, which last happened on June 5 to 6, 2012. A transit won't happen again until Dec. 10 to 11, 2117.

Venus' trip into the sun's glare will be brief. Venus and Earth are in an 8:13 resonance, so from Earth's point of view, Venus orbits the sun 13 times in every eight Earth years, according to The Planetary Society. A week or two after its inferior conjunction, Venus will have moved sufficiently away from the sun's glare to emerge into the dawn sky and begin its appearance as the "Morning Star". It will reach its highest point in the sky on Oct. 23 as it appears 46.4 degrees west of the sun, according to Astro Pixels. That farthest point from the sun is called its greatest elongation west.

Venus will reach superior conjunction (appearing to go behind the sun) on June 4, 2024, achieving its greatest elongation east in the post-sunset sky on Jan. 10, 2025, according to Timeanddate.com.

A bizarre exoplanet with metallic clouds that rain titanium onto its scalding-hot interior is the shiniest planet ever discovered, a new study shows. The Neptune-size world, which scientists say "shouldn't exist," acts like a giant mirror, reflecting light back toward its home star, which is positioned unusually close to the lustrous world. 

The exoplanet, named LTT9779 b, was discovered in 2020 by researchers operating NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) spacecraft. The gas giant, which is around 260 light-years from Earth, is around five times more massive than our planet and orbits its sun-like star every 19 hours. Only 1 in 200 sun-like star systems contains an exoplanet with an orbit that lasts less than one day on Earth; these worlds are known as ultrashort-period planets.

In a new study published July 10 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers took a closer look at LTT9779 b using the European Space Agency's Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops) spacecraft. The team found that the planet's sun-facing side reflects around 80% of the starlight that hits it, which is the highest albedo, or reflectiveness, of a planet ever observed.

For context, Earth only reflects around 30% of the sunlight that hits our planet, despite being mainly covered by water and having highly reflective polar caps.

Related: Distant 'hell planet' with diamond core is the victim of a gravitational catastrophe

The secret to LTT9779 b's high albedo is its metallic clouds, which researchers believe are made predominantly from silicate — or glass — and titanate, a salt containing titanium. When researchers first discovered the exoplanet, they assumed that its close proximity to its star would prevent cloud formation because it was too hot for these materials to condense into a cloud; the planet's atmosphere likely reaches sweltering temperatures in excess of 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). 

But the planet's atmosphere likely has such a high abundance of silicate and titanate gases that they can turn into liquids, similar to how water vapor can form mini-clouds in a bathroom if you leave the shower running for long enough, the study's researchers wrote in a statement.  

LTT9779 b's metallic clouds also explain one of the exoplanet's puzzling traits — its size. Until now, all known ultrashort-period planets are either gas giants that are much larger than Jupiter or rocky planets no larger than Earth. As a result, experts had predicted that smaller gas giants like LTT9779 b could not exist so close to their home star.

"It's a planet that shouldn't exist," study co-author Vivien Parmentier, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford in the U.K. and the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, said in the statement. "We expect planets like this to have their atmosphere blown away by their star, leaving behind bare rock."

However, the exoplanet's metallic clouds can help explain its unusual size.

"The clouds reflect light and stop the planet from getting too hot and evaporating," study lead author Sergio Hoyer, a planetary scientist at the Marseille Laboratory of Astrophysics in France and a Cheops mission scientist, said in the statement. "Meanwhile, being highly metallic makes the planet and its atmosphere heavy and harder to blow away."

But even with its shiny shielding,LTT9779 b was most likely larger than Jupiter when it first formed and has since been eroded over time, the researchers theorize.

Until now, the shiniest known planet in the universe was Venus, which bounces back 75% of the sun's light thanks to its highly reflective cloud layer. It was once thought that Venus' clouds contained phosphine, a gas produced by microorganisms on Earth, which hinted that the planet may harbor extraterrestrial life. But this controversial idea about Venus’ habitability was debunked by a 2022 study.

Due to LTT9779 b's extreme temperatures and boiling metallic rain, it also seems unlikely that the mirror-like world could support alien life.

In early July, the moon will pass close to all three of Earth's neighboring  inner solar system planets, plus the two largest planets that orbit the sun.

First, the gas giants Saturn and Jupiter will be viewable next to the moon before sunrise early in the month. Later in July, Mercury, Venus and Mars will shine close to a crescent moon after sunset.

All five planets and Earth's moon will be easily visible to the naked eye from anywhere in the world with clear skies. However, a good pair of stargazing binoculars or a nice small telescope will enhance the view. 

The first conjunction (a celestial event in which two objects appear close together in Earth's night sky) of the moon and a planet will occur on July 7, when an 80%-lit waning gibbous moon will be visible just below Saturn. The two objects will rise in the southeastern night sky in the early morning and will be visible until dawn. 

On July 11, a 37%-lit waning gibbous moon, positioned slightly above Jupiter, will rise in the east late at night. The following morning, the moon will have waned to 27% illumination and will be visible just below Jupiter. 

Mercury, Venus and Mars — the other three rocky planets in the solar system — will be closely grouped with a slender waxing gibbous crescent moon in the early-evening western night sky from July 19 to July 21. 

Because the crescent moon will be barely 5% lit on July 19, however, this will be the hardest night to see it close to the rocky planets. That will also be true for Mercury, which will be very low on the horizon. However, bright Venus will be obvious alongside the crescent moon, while Mars will be easily seen above. Don't mistake Mars for Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, which will sit between Venus and Mars. Use binoculars, find a clear view toward the western horizon and begin looking about 35 minutes after sunset, according to When The Curves Line Up, a site run by astronomer Jeffrey Hunt.

On July 20 — the 54th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first moon landing — the crescent moon will be much easier to see. As well as being 10% lit, the moon will have climbed higher and will shine alongside Mars, just above Venus. Mercury will remain low on the west-northwest horizon. While you're gazing at the trio of planets, look for "Da Vinci glow" on the dark limb of the moon. Also called Earthshine, the phenomenon is caused by reflected sunlight from Earth's oceans, clouds and ice. 

The following evening, July 21, a 16%-lit crescent moon will appear even higher above the western horizon, but it will be aligned with Mars and Venus. Mercury will be to the right of Venus. 

On the following nights, the moon will depart the scene and climb higher into the post-sunset sky, with Venus sinking into the sun's glare while Mercury continues to rise above it. On July 28, Mercury will shine within just a tenth of a degree of Regulus in twilight, according to Adler Planetarium. It should be an excellent sight, even to the naked eye. 

You can check the exact rise and set times for the planets for your location using the Night Sky page on timeanddate, or planetarium software such as Stellarium Web Online Star Map. 

The summer solstice on June 21 may be an important annual observance on Earth, but aside from the sun being its highest in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere, it's not typically a stargazing event. That changes in 2023 with the appearance in the solstice's evening twilight of Venus, Mars and a slim crescent moon in the western sky. 

The three celestial bodies won't appear this close together again to observers in North and South America until March 28, 2028, according to When The Curves Line Up. With alignments also appearing on the evenings before and after the solstice, it's a great week to be outside in twilight, with the added bonus of Da Vinci glow — or Earthshine, sunlight reflected by the Earth onto the dark lunar surface — visible on the waxing crescent moon. 

Related: Summer solstice: The science behind the longest day of the year

If you want to look for the slimmest crescent moon possible then use stargazing binoculars to find it in twilight low on the western horizon on Monday, June 19. It will be just over 3% illuminated, so may be difficult to spot in the bright post-sunset sky. 

The following evening, Tuesday, June 20, will see a slightly brighter and higher crescent moon form a line in the sky with bright Venus and dim Mars. The moon will be almost 8% illuminated and will display vivid Da Vinci glow on its darkened limb.

Perhaps the best view of the three bodies comes on Wednesday, June 21 during the first twilight following the start of the  summer solstice, according to Timeanddate.com. The start of astronomical summer in the Northern Hemisphere will be marked by a right-angle triangle of Mars, Venus and a 13% illuminated crescent moon, though dim mars may be hard to spot without binoculars or a good small telescope. Look out for Da Vinci glow on the moon once again.

The final sight of the week occurs the following evening when, on Thursday, June 22, a 21% illuminated crescent moon will align once again with Mars and Venus, but this time from above the pair. The moon will also be close to Regulus in the constellation Leo.

All of these sights can be seen with the naked eye, but for a spectacular close-up of Da Vinci glow on the lunar surface a pair of stargazing binoculars or a telescope will help.

Earth probably shouldn't exist. 

That's because the orbits of the inner solar system planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are chaotic, and models have suggested that these inner planets should have crashed into each other by now. And yet, that hasn't happened.

New research published May 3 in the journal Physical Review X may finally explain why. 

Through a deep plunge into the models for planetary motion, the researchers discovered that the motions of the inner planets are constrained by certain parameters that act as a tether that inhibits the system's chaos. Besides providing a mathematical explanation for the apparent harmony in our solar system, the new study's insights may help scientists understand the trajectories of exoplanets surrounding other stars. 

Unpredictable planets

Planets constantly exert a mutual gravitational pull on each other – and these little tugs constantly make minor adjustments to the planets' orbits. The outer planets, which are much larger, are more resistant to little tugs and so maintain comparatively stable orbits. 

The problem of inner planet trajectories, however, is still too complicated to solve exactly. In the late 19th century, mathematician Henri Poincaré proved that it is mathematically impossible to solve the equations governing the motion for three or more interacting objects, often known as the "three body problem." As a result, uncertainties in the details of the planets' starting positions and velocities balloon over time. In other words: It is possible to take two scenarios in which the distances between Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth differ by the slightest amount, and in one the planets smash into each other and in another they veer apart. 

The time it takes for two trajectories with almost identical starting conditions to diverge by a specific amount is known as the Lyapunov time of the chaotic system. In 1989, Jacques Laskar, astronomer and research director at the National Center for Scientific Research and Paris Observatory and a co-author of the new study, calculated the characteristic Lyapunov time for the planetary orbits of the inner solar system was just 5 million years. 

"It means basically that you lose one digit every 10 million years," Laskar, told Live Science. So, for example if the initial uncertainty in the position of a planet is 15 meters, 10 million years later this uncertainty would be 150 meters; after 100 million years, a further 9 digits are lost, giving an uncertainty of 150 million kilometers, equivalent to the distance between Earth and the sun. "Basically you have no idea where the planet is," said Laskar.

While 100 million years may seem long, the solar system itself is over 4.5 billion years old, and the lack of dramatic events — such as a planetary collision or a planet being ejected from all this chaotic motion — long puzzled scientists. 

Laskar then looked at the problem in a different way: by simulating the inner planet trajectories over the next 5 billion years, stepping from one moment to the next. He found just a 1% chance of a planetary collision. With the same approach, he calculated that it would take, on average, about 30 billion years for any of the planets to collide. 

Reining in the chaos

Delving through the math, Laskar and his colleagues then identified for the first time "symmetries" or "conserved quantities" in the gravitational interactions that create a "practical barrier in the chaotic wandering of the planets," Laskar said. 

These emergent quantities remain nearly constant and inhibit certain chaotic motions, but don't prevent them altogether, much like the raised lip of a dinner plate will inhibit food falling off the plate but not prevent it completely. We can thank these quantities for our solar system's apparent stability.

Renu Malhotra, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the study, highlighted how subtle the mechanisms identified in the study are. Malhotra told Live Science that it is interesting that "our solar system's planetary orbits exhibit exceptionally weak chaos." 

In other work, Laskar and colleagues are searching for clues as to whether the number of planets in the solar system ever differed from what we currently see. For all the stability evident today, whether that has always been the case over the billions of years before life evolved remains an open question. 

Stargazers are set for a spectacular show this Saturday (April 22), as the moon and Venus ​ — the two brightest objects in the night sky — will appear as if they are about to collide amid a meteor shower, all while set against the backdrop of a stunning star cluster. 

Venus will appear 6 degrees above and to the left of the waxing crescent moon by Saturday, with the Pleiades star cluster — a group of seven visible (and many more dim) stars popularly known as the "Seven Sisters" — about the same apparent distance below a beautiful and slender crescent moon, according to NASA. 

As if that weren't enough of a sight, the sky will also be flecked with "shooting stars" from the Lyrid meteor shower, which will peak Saturday evening to Sunday morning. The Lyrids are  best witnessed in a dark, clear location. Weather permitting, as many as 18 meteor streaks per hour may be visible during this window, according to the American Meteor Society.

Related: 100,000-year-old story could explain why the Pleiades are called 'Seven Sisters'

For weeks, the moon and Venus have been inching toward the point where they appear closest to each other in Earth's sky, known as a conjunction. This phenomenon, which occurs once every few months between the moon and the other planets in the solar system, is a trick of perspective from our 2D view of the night sky. The moon and Venus are, of course, actually millions of miles apart, and the Pleiades are even farther away, at 444 light-years from Earth. 

You won't need a telescope or binoculars to see any of the cast in this cosmic drama, although viewing equipment will give you significantly more detail than the naked eye. If you want to use equipment to watch the show, see our recommendations for the best binoculars for stargazing.

With or without binoculars, catching the conjunction requires looking low along the western horizon just after sunset to see the crescent moon and the sparkling Pleiades hang below the brilliant Venus. On the darkened limb of the crescent moon, you should also see a glint, which has been reflected from Earth onto the moon and is known as Earthshine. If the sky is clear, flecks of fireballs from the Lyrid meteor shower will be visible. 

Meteor showers occur when debris from a comet's tail vaporizes high up in Earth's atmosphere, making the dust and ice shed from the comet appear as a glowing trail of heated atmospheric gas. The burning sky furrows made by the Lyrids — one of the oldest known meteor showers and first discovered in China around 687 B.C. — are fragments from Comet Thatcher.

Streaming particles of space debris from Comet Thatcher have been visible from Earth for more than 2,600 years and strike our planet every April at speeds of around 29 miles per second (47 kilometers per second) as Earth's orbit takes us through Thatcher's debris tail, according to NASA. Thatcher is traveling slowly around the sun, making a complete orbit once every 415 years.

In the background hang the Pleiades, named after the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione in Greek mythology. According to myth, Atlas — one of the Titans and a cousin of Zeus, the king of the gods — rebelled against Zeus and was punished by being forced to forever bear the heavens on his broad shoulders. To ameliorate his cousin's eternal sentence, Zeus placed Atlas' grieving daughters in the heavens so that they could accompany their father.

If you can't catch Saturday's spectacle from your location, you can watch a livestream of the conjunction, as seen from Rome, courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project. The stream will begin at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT on Saturday, April 22).