The ecliptic is also the reason that we on Earth sometimes observe planets appearing to approach closely to each other in the sky "while they careen around the cosmic racetrack," according to NASA.

In particularly rare events, all eight planets may line up in such a way that they appear in our night sky together, following the ecliptic – the sun's apparent path through the sky. The planet ...

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC HELSINKI — China plans to send a space observatory out of the plane of the ecliptic for a mission to study the poles of the sun. The Solar Polar Orbit Observatory ...

The planets are always actually lined up, but we just can't see them all at once. The planets are always in a line called an ecliptic – the plane where they orbit the Sun. As the planets race around ...

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An alignment occurs based on the ecliptic, an imaginary plane that governs the Earth’s orbit — plus the other seven planets’ orbit — around the Sun. Each planet in the solar system stays on this plane ...

These alignments occur due to the planets' shared orbit along the ecliptic plane, a cosmic arrangement dating back to the Solar System’s formation. While planets orbit slightly above or below ...