Rhythms in Space

After the ‘Christmas Star’ Saturn-Jupiter conjunction last week, you might be wondering how often an event like this happens. Even more interesting than how often is the why behind these occurrences. It turns out that like most things in nature, patterns emerge and are often just as intriguing as they are beautiful.

All of the planets in our solar system interact in a complicated dynamic system, with each planets’ gravity pulling on each other proportional to their distance. Over time, this dynamic system settles into more stable rhythms called ‘resonances’ that over time cause repeating patterns to emerge. It’s related to the same phenomenon that causes tidal locking with the Moon, which makes only one face visible to us from Earth.

To read more about how this phenomenon affects conjunctions, read Sky & Telescope’s article here:

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-400-year-rhythm-of-great-conjunctions/

If you want to learn more about orbital resonance, check out this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxISBhMBDD4&pbjreload=101

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