快猫短视频

ARE YOU prepared for the imminent devastation of the Earth? No, it鈥檚 not the
millennium bug, killer asteroids or alien attack. In case you haven鈥檛 heard, all
the naked-eye planets鈥擬ercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn鈥� will
line up with the Sun and the Moon on Friday 5 May. Apparently, this strange
celestial grouping happens only once every six thousand years, and, just like
the last time, the combined gravity of the planets will tilt the Earth鈥檚 axis,
putting Kenya at the North Pole and Antarctica on the equator. Melting ice will
flood the world, inundating all major population centres. Not since the days of
Noah has humankind been faced with this calamity.

Or so says Richard W. Noone, author of 5/5/2000 Ice: the Ultimate
Disaster. Originally published in 1982, without the ominous date in the
title, the book reappeared in a revised edition a couple of years ago. It
includes discussions on Atlantis, UFOs, Stonehenge, the mystery of the pyramids,
freemasonry, the CIA and the Turin Shroud. Written in a persuasive style, it has
been alarming people ever since it was published.

Don鈥檛 panic. In fact, planetary alignments are entirely innocuous.
Nevertheless, similar conjunctions to this one have had their influence on human
society, among other things fixing the starting point of the ancient Chinese
calendar and inspiring a curious piece of 18th century clockwork.

Ever since Johannes Kepler discovered his laws of planetary motion early in
the 17th century, astronomers have been able to calculate the position of a
planet for any particular date in the past or the future. But finding instances
when seven objects group together in the sky is much more complicated,
especially without using digital computers. So it wasn鈥檛 until 1961 that the
grouping of 5 May 2000 was discovered, by the Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus.

Using planetary tables from 1914, Meeus calculated, by hand, the dates of all
planetary groupings similar to the one in May 2000 that spanned less than 30
degrees and that happened between 1000 and 2400 AD. He found 14 cases, which he
published in the December 1961 issue of the American astronomy magazine Sky
& Telescope.

This article contained the first reference to the grouping of 5 May 2000, and
Meeus thinks it probably instigated the later astrological alarms. Indeed, the
1977 book called The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Tom Valentine
mentioned the conjunction as a possible bringer of doom, and a year later, in
We are the Earthquake Generation, 鈥減sychic archaeologist鈥� Jeffrey
Goodman wrote about the disasters that would be caused by the celestial
assembly: 鈥淨uakes and volcanoes are set off around the world and a rift opens up
as the Earth splits in several places to relieve the stress produced by the
shift.鈥� Noone mentions Goodman鈥檚 book as one of his sources.

But all of this fails to acknowledge the main reason why Meeus wrote his 1961
article. A similar conjunction of the Sun, Moon and the five naked-eye planets
was about to occur on 5 February 1962, with the seven objects spanning a mere 16
degrees of the sky. Moreover, the Moon would not only be in the Sun鈥檚
neighbourhood, but would actually eclipse it, enabling earthbound astronomers to
observe the spectacle.

Practically nothing

As far as we know, the Earth didn鈥檛 fall over on 5 February 1962, Antarctica
didn鈥檛 melt, and the only event worth mentioning was the call for the
independence of Algeria by French President Charles de Gaulle. Valentine,
Goodman and Noone made no reference to that conjunction. Nor did they mention
the fact that other such groupings had occurred in 1662 and 1821.

So the cosmic line-ups are not as rare as Noone seems to be suggesting. But
might they still have measurable effects here on Earth? After all, every month
when the Sun and the Moon line up, their tides combine. We call these
particularly high tides spring tides. What happens when five planets add their
gravitational influence?

Practically nothing. The Moon exerts a large tidal force on the Earth because
it is very close. The Sun raises somewhat smaller but still appreciable tides
about a third as powerful as the Moon鈥檚, because it is very massive. Planets,
even giants like Jupiter and Saturn, are much less massive than the Sun and much
farther away than the Moon. Even if all the planets lined up perfectly, and they
were all at the smallest possible distance from the Earth, their total tidal
effect would be only 0.015 per cent of the tidal effect of the Sun. Nothing to
worry about.

Noone isn鈥檛 the first to cry wolf at a harmless planetary alignment.
Twenty-five years ago, in their book The Jupiter Effect, John Gribbin
and Stephen Plagemann predicted the possibility of danger from a celestial
arrangement that was to happen in 1982. All the planets would gather on one side
of the Sun, and, according to the authors, their combined gravity would cause
disturbances in the Sun鈥檚 magnetic field, leading to solar storms that would
affect the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere and cause earthquakes.

In fact, the planets were only loosely gathered in one quadrant of the Solar
System, spanning a 95-degree arc as seen from the Sun鈥斺�漚 far cry from an
alignment鈥�, according to Meeus. And again, the tidal forces exerted by the
planets on the Sun are vanishingly small, and past alignments have shown no
tendency to produce such a strange and devastating chain of events.

So the conjunction of 5 May 2000 isn鈥檛 rare or dangerous. Will it at least be
spectacular? In the months before the conjunction it will be plainly visible
that the heavens are up to something. The giant planets Jupiter and Saturn are
already getting closer and closer in the evening sky, and Mars will join them
towards the end of March. An impressive conjunction happens in the early evening
hours of Thursday, 6 April, when the planetary trio gets company from the
crescent Moon. One month later, the Sun will have moved into this part of the
sky, dragging the inner planets Mercury and Venus with it. And on Friday, 5 May,
when the Moon also returns, all seven 鈥渃lassical鈥� wanderers鈥攖he Sun, the
Moon and the five naked-eye planets鈥攚ill span less than 26 degrees of the
sky. Unfortunately, none of these later stages will be visible. Because the Sun
takes part in the cosmic gathering, the planets will be overwhelmed by its glare
whenever they are above the horizon.

But some planetary alignments are more eye-catching. In the August 1997 issue
of Sky & Telescope, almost 35 years after his original publication,
Meeus re-examined his earlier results using a computer. He also studied
groupings of just the five naked-eye planets. Sometimes, such gatherings can be
seen shortly before sunrise or immediately after sunset. In the early evening of
25 June 710, for instance, the planets occupied an area less than 6 degrees
across鈥攕maller than the field of a pair of binoculars. This grouping was
striking enough to be noticed and recorded by the Maya in northeastern
Guatemala.

Another spectacular grouping almost 4000 years ago marked the zero point of
the ancient Chinese calendar of the first royal dynasty, according to Kevin Pang
of NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and John Bangert of the US Naval
Observatory. They reported their discoveries in 1993 at a meeting of the
American Astronomical Society in Berkeley, California.

In the first century BC, Liu Xiang wrote a chronicle called the Hong Fan
Zhuan, which states that 鈥渢he ancient Zhuanxu calendar began at dawn, in
the beginning of spring, when the Sun, new Moon and five planets gathered in the
constellation Yingshi [Pegasus]鈥�. In 1993, Pang and Bangert searched for a
matching astronomical event using a special computer program developed at JPL,
and hit upon the one conjunction in 1953 BC. This was an especially close
conjunction, with the five-naked eye planets just 4.3 degrees apart on 27
February. A few days later, on 5 March, the planets were still close together,
and they coincided with the new Moon. Planetary gatherings have always been seen
as good omens by Chinese astrologers, and a spectacular conjunction coinciding
with the start of a new lunar cycle and the beginning of spring may have been
regarded as a good occasion for a new start.

A striking conjunction

Sometimes, however, these phenomena are peddled as ill omens, rather than
good. More than two centuries ago in the Dutch town of Franeker in the province
of Friesland, fears about a planetary conjunction prompted an amateur astronomer
to build what is now the oldest working mechanical planetarium in the world.

The year was 1774. Johann Bode, an astronomer from Germany, had predicted a
striking conjunction of the crescent Moon and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars
and Jupiter in the early morning hours of Sunday 8 May. Hardly anyone would have
paid any attention if it hadn鈥檛 been for a booklet distributed throughout
Friesland, written by someone who signed himself as 鈥淎 Lover of Truth鈥�. It
claimed that the conjunction could be 鈥渁 preparation or commencing of the
demolition or destruction of the Solar System, either partly or entirely鈥�. Only
later was the author identified as Eelco Alta, a vicar from the small village of
Bozum, who apparently hoped that his little book of doom might increase the size
of his congregation.

When the local peasants started to panic, woolcomber and amateur astronomer
Eise Eisinga decided to build a planetarium in his living room, to display and
explain the true movements of the planets (快猫短视频, 19 February
1994, p 30). Completed in 1781, the same year as the discovery of Uranus, it is
a scale model of the Solar System out to the orbit of Saturn, moving in real
time, and driven by a pendulum and hundreds of wooden cogwheels with hand-forged
iron nails. The planetarium is expected to be fully millennium compliant, and
should play its part next May in debunking turn-of-the-century end-of-the-world
stories.

Unfortunately, predictions that fail to come true are easily forgotten. A
hundred years from now, people will probably predict catastrophe on 2 November
2100, when another seven-object gathering will occur at the threshold of a new
century. I bet no one will remember that a similar grouping on 9 September 2040
was harmless.