The following is about the remarkable rhythmic dance the three largest planets of our solar system perform together while orbiting the sun – and how that dance ties in with our 60th birthdays, and life on Earth as a whole. (I emphasise it’s about astronomy, not astrology, i.e. not horoscopes and such stuff, but Isaac-Newton-Albert-Einstein-Stephen-Hawking kind of stuff.)
Around the time of my 24th birthday, while I was looking at the clear night sky, I realised that the planet Jupiter (the largest in the solar system and one of the brightest objects in the firmament) was roughly in the same spot it had been when I first started regularly stargazing, which was when I was 11/12. In a flash, another realisation came to me: this is where Jupiter was in the sky around the time I was born. I knew this because by then I had learnt that Jupiter takes about 12 years (to be precise, 11.86 years) to orbit the sun.
In other words: In every person’s life, every 12 years Jupiter appears pretty much in the same place in the sky, relative to the fixed stars, where it was when this person was born. (In my case: In the constellation of Taurus.)
OK, that’s no big deal, you might say.
But wait – there’s more.
The planet Saturn, the second largest planet in the solar system, and the next furthest away from the sun after Jupiter, takes about 30 years (to be precise, 29.45 years) to orbit our central star. This means that every 30 years in any person’s life, Saturn happens to be in the place in the sky, as seen from Earth, where it was when this person was born. (In my case, in the constellation of Aquarius.)
Taken together, this means that, if and (hopefully) when you turn 60, both Jupiter and Saturn are concurrently in the same position in the sky where they each were when you were born. (Jupiter for the 5th, Saturn for the 2nd time.)
This happens only once in your lifetime, and it happens when you turn 60. Unless, of course, you live to the biblical age of 120 – in which case it happens twice.
Now, if you’re already past 60 and therefore unspeakably sad that you weren’t aware of this uniquely magical astronomical moment when it happened for you, don’t fret: chances are you could still experience another, similar such magical moment. Although you might need a telescope to fully appreciate it.
This other moment has to do with the planet the name of which sounds in English a bit, ahem, unfortunate: Uranus.
(Uranus can’t be seen with the naked eye and was discovered in 1781 by German (!) immigrant to Bath (!) William Herschel. He discovered it with the help of his DIY reflecting telescope from his back garden in New King Street. He lived there with his sister in a house which is now the Herschel Museum, just a few minutes’ walk away from Queen Square and worth a visit.)
Uranus is the next-smaller planet after Saturn (i.e., the third largest in our solar system). It is also the next planet further away from the sun after Saturn. It takes almost exactly 84 years (to be precise, 84.02 years) to orbit the sun.
The mathematically inclined among you will already have twigged where this is heading.
When you reach the age of 84 (and only then), both Jupiter and Uranus will concurrently be in their respective places in the sky where they were at your birth (Jupiter for the 7th, Uranus for the 1st time; the latter in my case in the constellation of Leo.)
What I find amazing about all this is not how the larger planets of our solar system align with, or affect, our personal lives (they most likely don’t); but how, over some thousands of millions of years of their existence, they have fallen into a kind of remarkable rhythmic dance around the sun. (Astronomers tell us that, when the planets first formed out of the disk of matter rotating around the young sun, they were not on their current orbits, and neither will they stay there.)
Consider this. The relative orbital times of the three largest planets can be expressed in almost perfect whole-number ratios: For Jupiter and Saturn it’s 5/2, for Jupiter and Uranus it’s 7/1, and for Saturn and Uranus it’s 14/5 (14×30 and 5×84 are both 420).
Why am I writing all this? Well, a certain stargazer turned 60 today. And Jupiter is, again, in Taurus – and Saturn, again, in Aquarius.
P.S.: There’s actually at least one way, according to science, in which the planets do have an enormous effect on our lives. But not our personal lives.
Apparently, due to where Jupiter and Saturn are orbiting the sun (and have been for some hundreds of millions of years), their gravitational force holds back a huge number of asteroids and comets. If their orbits were somewhat different, this cosmic debris would be bombarding us at a much greater frequency than it actually does and thus make life impossible on Earth. Also, the current position of those and other planets’ orbits stabilises Earth’s orbit. Meaning the other planets are keeping Earth securely in the so-called “Goldilocks zone”, or habitable zone, where the amount and intensity of solar and interstellar rays are “just right” for life.
Oh, and the Moon happens to have exactly the right mass (within a very narrow margin) to keep the Earth’s axis from wobbling about too much, again allowing life here that would otherwise be impossible.
There are a host of other mind-blowing facts on the dizzying unlikelihood (and therefore uniqueness and preciousness) of life on Earth, but I’ll stop here, as otherwise this would really cease to be a ‘little’ message.
P.S: Here’s a link where you can check where the planets can be seen in the sky currently or could be seen in the past (going back to the year 2000) or in the future (going forward to the year 2050): https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/