sciencealert
The waltz between Earth and Venus around the Sun has been doing just that, for centuries – and it certainly does make a stunning pattern.
(Matthew Henderson)
This viral gif, posted by Matthew Henderson on Tumblr, plots the midpoint between the two planets through time – Venus in orange and Earth in blue – as they follow their usual paths around the Sun.
As Henderson explains in the caption, “eight Earth years are roughly equal to 13 Venus years, meaning the two planets approximately trace out this pattern with 5-fold symmetry as they orbit the Sun.”
The beautiful animation is based on data from University of Wisconsin geoscientist Steven Dutch, who created an interactive graphic in 2012, demonstrating how Venus’s closest orbital points to Earth, over eight years, map out the points of a “remarkable, but not perfect” pentagram in the sky.
“The orbits are approximated as circles, so this animation cannot be used for accurate predictions,” Dutch stated.
All planets have elliptical orbits, making these diagrams simplified representations of the real deal. But they aren’t radically far off, especially in Venus’s case. Venus has the most circular orbit of any of the planets in our Solar System.
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