What happens if all planets align

According to Word of God , 1, years after Saturn is in a certain alignment, a child is born with ice magic.

This was going to be explained in the film itself but was cut for not being important to the focus of the film. This was eventually retconned out in the sequel when it properly explains her powers. TMNT : the portal to the netherworld opens when the stars line up. Films — Live-Action. The Coneheads ' symbol of their home planet represents three crescent moons overlapping. When the Coneheads finally return, it does indeed have three moons that periodically align in this way, instigating a major festival.

The plot of Pitch Black revolves around a 22 year cycle eclipse of all the suns of a planet. In Highlander: The Source , the entire galaxy —every single celestial body from moons to planets to stars, and all of them in the solar system —comes into alignment, all focused on Earth. Even non-scientists and children knew better, but that didn't stop the writers.

Well, that could just be The alignment of three stars creates the second Star of Bethlehem, a sign of the Second Coming of Christ. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. A magic item that can be used to control time can only be accessed during a planetary alignment that occurs once every 5, years. The Dark Crystal involves a triple-sun alignment called the Great Conjunction.

For some reason, the planets are visible, to the point where they would actually collide with each other. Pee-wee's Big Adventure - after his bike was stolen, Pee-wee has all his friends assemble in his basement as he manically pieces together clues to the crime - including planetary alignment.

A major plot point of Thor: The Dark World is the Convergence, an alignment of the Nine Realms that only happens once ever years, causing portals between the worlds to open at random. Malekith intends to use the Convergence to spread the Aether across the universe, destroying everything. In "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite", the portal opens with an alignment of the Monolith and the major Jovian moons.

In Headless Horseman , the Horseman rises once every seven years on all Hallows Eve when the entirety of the constellation Hydra is visible in the sky. Robert A. Heinlein 's Farmer in the Sky featured a dramatic alignment of the moons of Jupiter which the protagonists watched from Ganymede.

In Kushiel's Mercy , the Carthaginians take advantage of an astrological event to put a spell on the entire city. In the Cthulhu Mythos universe by H.

Lovecraft and others, there are many references to how the Great Old Ones will return "when the stars are right". In the famous story, The Call of Cthulhu, the narrative states that Cthulhu had been awakened by ignorant sailors because "the stars were right again" when the sailors discovered the uncharted island.

The cultist ritual that's broken up in an earlier part of the story may also be responsible; something made the island briefly rise to where they could find it Though it's never explicitly said what that entails. In fact an alternate interpretation at least in Cthulhu's case is that it refers to the Elder-Things who may or may not have been responsible for trapping Cthulhu underwater to begin with which are described as having star-like heads.

One of the lesser Dragonlance novels featured a portentous lunar alignment between the white, red, and black moons of Krynn, known as the "Night of the Eye". In John Brunner 's The Traveller in Black series, the Traveller makes his periodic journeys when a certain array of four planets comes into alignment.

Two alignments of the seven planets play a major role in the timing of the third book of the Septimus Heap series. After he misses the moment, he creates the titular clock to try and drag time back to the right position again. In Robin Jarvis ' Deptford Histories book Thomas , a constellation of nine stars in the sky signify when the serpent God of Evil Suruth Scarophion is closest to the living plane.

Nine bright stars from out the void, shining up on high Whose banished soul do they call back and augur in the sky? Despoiler of the ancient lands, who baked the deserts dry. Scarophion, Scarophion - the demon is close by. Live Action TV. The X-Files episode " Syzygy ". An alignment of Mercury, Mars and Uranus may have something to do with several murder cases in a small town.

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore appeared on Have I Got News for You at a time when an impending alignment of the planets was being hyped in the tabloids as a catastrophe. Angus Deayton gave him pieces of fruit to represent the planets and kept referring back to the rumors, even though what Moore was demonstrating with the fruit was that absolutely nothing was going to happen.

It is often only visible at specific times of the year, after sunset or in early twilight, reports Inverse. Soon after peak, Mercury reached its greatest maximum elongation from the sun on March 6, Inverse reports.

While the two planets' conjunction already passed, Mercury will still be visible during the alignments of the "planetary trio" in the east-southeastern horizon until early Thursday morning on March During the three planets' alignment, Jupiter and Mercury will be 0.

Although the planets seem like they are close in proximity and we can see them in the Earthly skies, they are actually extremely far away. Mercury is 89 million miles away from Earth, Jupiter is million miles away and Saturn is the furthest at almost a billion miles from Earth.

The closest object in proximity to Earth is the moon at , miles away, reports Joe Rao for Space. Sometimes a planet is a little above the plane, and sometimes a little below For this reason, surprisingly, it's actually rather rare for more than two planets to be near each other in the sky at the same time.

Even if the planets did all align in a perfectly straight line, it would have negligible effects on the earth. Fictional and pseudo-science authors like to claim that a planetary alignment would mean that all of the gravitational fields of the planets add together to make something massive that interferes with life on earth. In truth, the gravitational pulls of the planets on the earth are so weak that they have no significant effect on earth life.

There are only two solar system objects with enough gravity to significantly affect earth: the moon and the sun. The sun's gravity is strong because the sun is so massive. The moon's gravitational effect on the earth is strong because the moon is so close.

The sun's gravity causes earth's yearly orbit and therefore, combined with earth's tilt, it causes the seasons. The moon's gravity is primarily responsible for the daily ocean tides. The near alignment of the sun and the moon does have an effect on the earth, because their gravitational fields are so strong. This partial alignment occurs every full moon and new moon, and it leads to extra strong tides called " spring tides ".

The word "spring" here refers to the fact that the water seems to leap up the shore with the extra strong tides every two weeks, and not that they occur only in the Spring season. Let's put some numbers behind these claims. Using Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation and the known masses and distances of the sun, the moon, and the planets, we can calculate the gravitational force that a kg person feels from each astronomical body when he is located on earth's surface at the equator:.

Note that because the planets orbit the sun along different paths at different speeds, the distance between them is constantly changing.

Therefore, in the interest of seeing what the effect of a planetary alignment might be, I have calculated the gravitational force from each planet when it is the closest to the earth.

As this table shows, even if all the planets lined up at the points in their orbits where they are closest to the earth, the absolute highest gravitational force that all the planets combined could exert on a kg person on earth's surface is 0.