An extraordinary and rare celestial event – an alignment of two distant planets and their star, predicted to take place on 1 April 2026 – will probably go unseen by humanity because astronomers have been denied telescope time to observe it.
The event is a syzygy, an alignment of three celestial bodies in a row, but because it will take place outside our solar system, it has been dubbed an exosyzygy, similar to the term exoplanet. The only known example of this took place in 2010 and was discovered by Teruyuki Hirano at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and his colleagues by analysing data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope.