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Astrologers predict alignment chaos

Science Editor,Steve Connor
Friday 05 May 2000 00:00 BST
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A rare alignment of the five brightest planets plus the Sun and the Moon will occur tonight amid wild speculation that it will cause global destruction due to massive tidal forces acting on the Earth.

Astrologers and other assorted soothsayers and quasi-scientific purveyors of untruths have predicted anything from the unleashing of mysterious energies to earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and tidal waves.

However, the astronomer who first calculated the unusual alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn has said that the additional gravitational pull created by the conjunction will have absolutely no impact on Earth.

The close grouping in the sky of the five planets with the Moon and the Sun has been the subject of intense conjecture among the prophets of doom and the new-age philosophers.

Jonathan Cainer, the highly paid astrologer of the Daily Express, has made much capital out of the event, saying that the conjunction has the power to "unleash energies, options and possibilities that people have long dreamed of".

Other astrologers have suggested that the alignment will create gravitational forces that will dislodge the Earth's angle of rotation, causing the poles to wobble and 200-foot tidal waves to wash away important coastal cities.

However, Jean Meeus, the Dutch astronomer who first predicted the alignment from calculations he made 40 years ago, says in the latest issueof Sky and Telescope magazine that the combined planetary tide caused by the alignment will be a tiny fraction of the average tidal force of the Sun -- itself a fraction of the tidal influence of the Moon.

Dr Meeus's calculations suggest that a jumbo jet flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet will exert more gravitational influence on the Earth than the entire alignment of the five planets.

A similar planetary alignment on 31 January 1962 was even more closely bunched than tonight's display yet even it failed to unleash the sort of cataclysmic destruction now predicted by the astrologers.

Mr Cainer suggested that the earlier planetary alignments in 531 and 1962 presaged major historical events - notably the spread of Christianity and the Cuban missile crisis.

Dr Meeus, however, remains nonplussed by such unearthly associations. "Some people seem obsessed by groupings or 'alignments' of planets, and it's quite likely that [my calculations] instigated the later astrological musings since it was the first reference to the May 2000 grouping," he says.

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