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On Dec. 1, 2020, a Christian media organization published a web page that alleged Saturn and Jupiter would line up in Earth's night sky to create a beautiful bright star on Dec. 21, three nights before Christmas Eve, and the date of winter solstice. The page's headline read: Planets will align causing rare 'Christmas Star' to appear in the sky this December. Several Snopes readers contacted us to investigate the claim. It was true that Jupiter and Saturn were traveling across Earth's sky together in 2020, as shown by online orbit simulators and confirmed by space agencies including NASA. That agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages robotic missions, said in a video: In other words, Saturn and Jupiter, which orbit in a counterclockwise direction as viewed from Earth's north pole, were moving closer together — often viewable around sunset, low in the western sky — over the course of weeks in December 2020. This was a typical pattern based on the pace of their orbits every roughly 20 years or so. But the exceptionally close distance between the two planets in December 2020 was what made the phenomena special, according to scientists. Around dusk on Dec. 21, Saturn and Jupiter will be separated by 0.1 degrees, or less than a third of the moon's width, Michael Brown, an astronomer at Monash University in Australia, told The Washington Post. You can actually see it with your own eye. It doesn’t have to be measured with sophisticated instruments, he said. The two objects are appearing very close in the sky, but ultimately they’re very far away from each other. The last time the two planets were equally close was in 1623, only 14 years after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made his first telescope, according to a news article by Deborah Byrd's EarthSky (formally a NPR-syndicated show) and a video lecture by Matthew Bate, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the United Kingdom's' University of Exeter. The EarthSky article read: [That] conjunction was only 13 degrees east of the sun (closely following the sun at sunset), and it is considered unlikely that it was noticed by many. Furthermore, Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan said the Saturn-Jupiter conjunction of 1632 was not viewable via the naked eye from most locations on Earth; glares from the sun made the occurrence nearly impossible to see. He wrote in an analysis: All of that said, it is true that, when the sun starts to set on Dec. 21, 2020, people in most locations will see Jupiter and Saturn aligned like a binary planet, as Hartigan put it, and that sight would be rare. However, he said it's false to describe the phenomenon as the two planets suddenly making a brilliant Christmas star, otherwise known as the Star of Bethlehem. According to Christian doctrine, Magi, or wise men, followed the guiding star to Bethlehem, where they paid homage to the infant Jesus. Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage, they say in the Gospel of St. Matthew. Dr. Richard Tresch Fienberg, a press officer for the American Astronomical Society, said in an email to Snopes: In sum, while it was accurate to state that the two planets would align on Dec. 21, 2020, and that that alignment has been a rare occurrence throughout centuries, no scientific evidence showed it would resemble the Christmas star to which the Gospel of Matthew refers in the telling of Jesus' birth.
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