Solar system planets set. The Sun and planets in a row on universe stars and lines of gravity background. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

/urls:
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/suns-magnetic-field-portrayed
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/545/artists-concept-our-solar-system/
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-spins-a-web-into-a-giant-red-spider-nebula

1187840427

Solar system planets set. The Sun and planets in a row on universe stars and lines of gravity background. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

Photo by: Elen11

Elen11

Six Planets are Retrograde, What Does that Mean for You?

Spoiler alert: It's an optical illusion.

September 27, 2022

All the planets of the solar system orbit around the Sun in the same direction. From our vantage point on the Earth, this makes them appear to march across the sky from season to season in the same direction. While you can’t discern this movement with your eyes in a single night, you can capture it if you pay close enough attention: one night the planet will be around a certain group of stars, and many months later it will be around a new clump of stellar friends.

These are the planets currently moving in retrograde:

  • Mercury from Sept. 10 to Oct. 2
  • Jupiter from July 28 to Nov. 23
  • Saturn June 4 to Oct. 23
  • Uranus Aug. 24 to Jan. 23
  • Neptune June 28 to Dec. 4
  • Pluto April 29 to Oct. 8

Eventually, the planets will return to the place they started. How long that takes depends on their distance from the Sun; planets with smaller orbits, like Mercury and Venus, will loop around our sky much faster than more distant worlds like Jupiter and Saturn.

But sometimes the planets appear to retrace their steps and move backward over the course of a few days or months, a phenomenon known as retrograde motion. If all the planets are moving in the same direction, then what gives?

The appearance of retrograde motion is due to our vantage point on the Earth. Just like all the other planets, we too are also orbiting around the Sun at our own speed. From our point of view, sometimes we “catch up” to another planet in its own orbit, making it appear as if it’s moving backward relative to us.

Think of runners on a racetrack. From the point of view of the stands, everybody’s running in the same direction. But from the point of view of one of the runners, their fellow racers may be moving away from them or coming closer to them, depending on their speeds and where on the track they happen to be.

You may have recently seen some articles talking about how six planets are currently in simultaneous retrograde. What does this mean for you, personally?

Nothing. It means nothing at all. One planet moving in retrograde doesn’t mean anything either – it’s literally just a planet moving in its orbit, doing the same thing it’s been doing for the past four and a half billion years. Multiple planets moving in retrograde is just a random coincidence. If those runners on the racetrack were going at it for eons, circling around and around without end, these kinds of coincidences would be bound to happen.

If anyone had asked an astronomer from centuries ago, they would have been able to predict with extreme precision when this simultaneous retrograde would occur. In fact, you can fire up any free astronomy software and do the same thing yourself, finding out exactly when the next one will happen, and the next, and the next, for millennia to come.

Planets do what they’re going to do, and what they’ve done for a very long time, and your personal life is in your hands, not in the stars above.

Next Up

Watch Out! Amateur Astronomer Watches as Jupiter Gets Whacked

Jupiter is the OG best friend in the solar system. It finds all the tiny little comets and asteroids heading for the vulnerable inner planets and takes one for the team, chewing up the dangerous rocks in its thick atmosphere. It happened again just recently, and this time an amateur astronomer caught it in the act.

Jupiter Makes Its Closest Approach to Earth in Nearly 60 Years

The last time Jupiter appeared this large and bright in the sky was in October 1963.

Saving Earth from Killer Asteroids

Only about 40% of an estimated 25,000 near-Earth asteroids with the potential to destroy the planet have been detected. Scientist Dr. Ed Lu, along with his nonprofit B612 are working to create a way to detect the other 60%.

How Exoplanets Became the Next Big Thing in Astronomy

To date, we know of over 5,000 planets outside the solar system. And astronomers suspect that there may be *checks notes* around a trillion more in our galaxy alone. The search for exoplanets is one of the hottest topics in astronomy, with expensive telescopes and giant collaborations all searching for the holy grail of the 21st century: an Earth 2.0, a habitable world like our own.

What We’ve Already Learned From James Webb? (Hint: it’s a lot)

That was worth the wait. Just a quick handful of months since its historic launch on Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope has flown to its observing position, unfolded its delicate instruments and ultra-sized mirror, and run through a suite of checks and alignments and calibrations. The team at NASA behind the telescopes released their first batch of images from the science runs, and besides being gorgeous, they're powerful.

Why Astronomers Care About Super-Old Galaxies?

A long time ago, our universe was dark.It was just 380,000 years after the big bang. Up until that age, our entire observable cosmos was less than a millionth of its present size. All the material in the universe was compressed into that tiny volume, forcing it to heat up and become a plasma. But as the universe expanded and cooled, eventually the plasma changed into a neutral gas as the first atoms formed.

Got You! Astronomers Find an Especially Sneaky Black Hole

Black holes are tricky creatures. Since ancient times the practice of astronomy has been to point our eyes and instruments at all the glowing things in the skies above us. But black holes are defined by the fact that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational clutches. So how you do see something that is completely, totally black?

This Year, James Webb will Take a Close Look at a Lava World

The James Webb Space Telescope is gearing up to be an exoplanet extraordinaire. Among many other missions and targets, astronomers plan to use the observatory, now in its final stages of preparations to study…well, a world where it might rain lava.

NASA Has Announced Plans for the Next Decade of Space Missions, And It’s Awesome

Personally speaking, I feel like we’ve been focusing on Mars a little bit too much recently. Sure, the Red Planet is all sorts of awesome – so awesome it may have once been a home for life – but with more than half a dozen orbiters, landers, and rovers, it’s certainly got its due.

What Comes After the Moon and Mars?

Space hotels may be in our future.

Related To: