Where Did Brilliant Venus Go? The Science Behind Its Vanishing Act
UNSPECIFIED - JANUARY 30: This set of images taken from Northampton in May 2004 show Venus as a ... More slowly shrinking crescent. The images were taken with a 180-cm Maksutov-Newtonian telescope. Photograph by Jamie Cooper. (Photo)
Every night for the last five months, a bright "star" has been blazing away in the western sky just after sunset. Now it's gone. What's going on?
Venus has been slowly getting closer to the sun and will pass roughly between Earth and our star this weekend — something astronomers call "inferior conjunction." On Saturday, March 22, Venus will be completely lost in the sun's glare and impossible to observe — but it's going out with a bang.
For the past month, Venus has been sinking lower to the horizon in the post-sunset western sky, appearing closer to the sun with each passing day and rapidly losing latitude — sunlight, from our point of view.
As it has done so, the views of Venus have been spectacular, with some even seeing it as a 'rainbow planet.' Since it's an inner planet as seen from Earth (its orbit around the sun takes just 225 days, compared with Earth's 365 days), we've been seeing the phases of Venus as it approached Earth, and it is now undertaking it on the inside. For the last few months, it has become a crescent and, in recent weeks, has become a thin sliver.
Something similar happened with the far dimmer Mercury, which was shining with Venus at the beginning of March. Both have now dropped from the night sky, ending the planet parade that caught the attention of many sky-watchers.
From Earth's perspective, Venus — for so long earning its nickname the "Evening Star" — will pass into the sun's glare. In the weeks after, it will emerge into the pre-dawn eastern sky and shine brightly as the "Morning Star." It will quickly rise higher into the twilight. Here are a few highlights for Venus-gazing over the next few months:
While Venus transits to the morning sky, only two naked-eye planets remain of the "planet parade" — Jupiter and Mars. These two outer planets, which lie farther from the sun than Earth so can't undertake us like Venus and Mercury, are called superior planets by astronomers.
Now high in the southern sky after dark, as seen from the Northern hemisphere, Jupiter is in the constellation Taurus, and Mars is in Gemini. The latter will align perfectly with Gemini's two bright stars, Castor and Pollux, on April 10
The next planetary parade — this time featuring six planets, excluding Mars — will be seen before sunrise on August 29, 2025.
The moment the inferior conjunction of Venus can, on rare occasions, mean we see it appear to pass across the disk of the sun. That's a transit of Venus, which last happened on June 5 to 6, 2012, and won't happen again until Dec. 10/11, 2117.
According to The Planetary Society, the orbits of Venus and Earth are in an 8:13 resonance, so Venus appears to loop around the sun 13 times every eight years from Earth's point of view.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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