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title: "Which of My Planets Are Combust, and How Badly" slug: which-of-my-planets-are-combust url_path: /insights/vedic/which-of-my-planets-are-combust angle: birth-data-gated demand_evidence: > Chat-log demand mining, 2026-08-26, cluster 5 "chart-technical verification": 124 opening questions, 224 mentions, 138 distinct users, out of 2,783 free-typed chart-chat messages from 985 people. Representative verbatim: a user whose Jupiter and Mars were flagged combust asked whether they were severely so, given a claimed Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga, the rule that cancels a planet's debilitation. A slug and title search of the full 3,178-row seo_pages dump returns no page on combustion. aio_rationale: > The answer is a degree measurement between the Sun and each planet in one specific chart, so it does not exist until a birth date, time and place are entered. An overview can define the word. It cannot say whether a particular Jupiter sits 0.1 degrees from the Sun or 10 degrees from it, which is the difference the question is actually about. engine_facts_used:

• "COMBUSTION_ORBS in backend/app/engines/chart_facts.py: the per-planet thresholds"
• "natal_combustion(): combust flag, separation in degrees, threshold in degrees"
• "get_all_positions(): sidereal longitude and daily speed for the Sun and each planet"
• "_angular_sep(): the shorter of the two angles between two longitudes"
• "detect_yogas(): Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga detection, which admits only a planet standing in its debilitation sign"
• "get_planet_dignity(): sign-based dignity, computed separately from combustion"
• "retrograde: whether a planet was moving backwards at birth, from planet speed and natal_retrograde_names()" absorbs: [] generator_model: max-inline generation_cost_usd: 0 engine_provenance: "origin/master @ dbd49bf, pinned sparse worktree, the ref the backend deploys from" computed_window: "1960-01-01 to 2025-12-31, 24,107 daily samples at 12:00 UT"

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Which of My Planets Are Combust, and How Badly

Your chart marks a planet combust when it stands closer to the Sun than a set number of degrees. Degrees here are positions around the 360 degrees of the zodiac, so the measurement is a subtraction: the planet's longitude minus the Sun's, taken the shorter way round. Whether that gap counts as combustion depends on which planet it is, because each one has a threshold of its own.

These are the six thresholds AstroMedha's engine applies.

The Sun is not on the list, because the distance being measured is its own. Rahu and Ketu are not on it either. They are the two points where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's path rather than bodies with light to lose, so the question does not reach them.

That table settles half of "how badly". The other half is the distance your own chart holds, and two charts that both say combust can be describing very different situations.

The label is a yes or no. The distance behind it is not.

Take a chart computed for 8 May 2000, 6:30 am, New Delhi. Five of its planets are combust at the same moment.

Jupiter in that chart is a tenth of a degree from the Sun, which is about a fifth of the width of a full Moon. Mars is 15.2° away, roughly thirty full Moons laid side by side. The same word covers both.

So if you have been told that two of your planets are combust, what you have been told is that both are inside their thresholds. The way to rank them against each other is the last column: the distance divided by that planet's own threshold. That fraction is arithmetic on two numbers your chart already carries rather than a classical rule, and it is the only fair way to set a burnt Venus beside a burnt Mars when their thresholds are 7° apart.

Deep is much rarer than combust

The obvious next question is where the line for "severe" falls. Measured across every day from 1 January 1960 to 31 December 2025, which is 24,107 daily positions computed on the same engine that draws your chart, combustion is spread almost evenly across the available range. For Venus, 25.0% of its combust days fall in the first quarter of the threshold, 24.8% in the second, 25.1% in the third and 25.1% in the last. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn land within one percentage point of the same even split. Mercury leans slightly outward, with 27.9% of its combust days in the outermost quarter.

Being combust therefore tells you almost nothing about being deeply combust. A planet inside the orb is about as likely to be sitting at the far edge of it as anywhere else.

What is genuinely uncommon is a very small separation. Over those same 24,107 days, Mercury came within one degree of the Sun on 2.88% of them, Venus on 1.54%, Mars on 0.89%, Jupiter on 0.67%, the Moon on 0.66% and Saturn on 0.61%. If your chart shows a separation under a degree, that is the rare reading, and it is rare for every planet on the list.

The median case is unremarkable by comparison. When Venus is combust its typical separation is 5.0°, half of its 10° threshold. Jupiter's median is 5.5°, the Moon's 5.8°, Mercury's 7.4°, Saturn's 7.5° and Mars's 8.5°. Half of all combust planets sit further out than that.

Having one is the normal case

On 68.3% of the days measured, at least one planet was inside its threshold. Exactly one planet was combust on 44.8% of days, two on 18.7%, three on 4.3%. Four or more happened on 119 days out of 24,107, which is one day in 203. The 8 May 2000 chart above, with five, is one of only 27 such days in those 66 years. All six were combust together on exactly two days, 4 and 5 February 1962.

Mercury is the reason the base rate is so high. It is combust on 43.4% of days, against 15.5% for Venus, the next most affected. The cause is orbital rather than astrological: Mercury circles the Sun inside the Earth's own orbit, so seen from here it never travels far from the Sun. Across the same 66 years its greatest distance from the Sun was 27.79°. With a threshold of 14°, roughly half of everywhere Mercury can appear is inside the burn. Venus is in the same position with more room to move, reaching 47.17° at most against a 10° threshold.

The other four are combust far less often: Mars on 15.4% of days, Saturn on 9.1%, Jupiter on 7.3% and the Moon on 6.5%. The Moon's figure is the plainest of the six to picture, since the Moon is within 12° of the Sun only around a new moon.

Read together, those numbers say something worth knowing before you worry: a combust planet is the ordinary condition of a chart rather than a mark against yours. Two in three charts carry at least one. What actually varies from person to person is which planet is burnt, how deeply, and what that planet is responsible for in your chart.

Which side of the Sun, and which way it was heading

A planet can be inside its threshold on either side of the Sun, at a longitude a few degrees higher or a few degrees lower. The threshold test does not care, because the measurement takes the shorter of the two angles between the planet and the Sun and compares that single number. Across the 24,107 days, the two sides come out even for every planet, within a percentage point of half and half. So the side your planet sits on is a fact about your chart specifically and not a tendency you share with most people.

In the 8 May 2000 chart, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn stand at longitudes ahead of the Sun and Mercury and Venus behind it. All five were closing on the Sun rather than pulling away from it, which the daily speeds in the same computation show directly: the Sun was moving at 0.97° a day, Mars at 0.70°, Jupiter at 0.24° and Saturn at 0.13°, so the Sun was gaining on all three.

That direction is worth a moment because it is close to a coin toss in general and specific in your case. Across the measured days, a combust planet was closing on the Sun on about 50% of them and moving away on the other 50%, for every one of the six. Your chart froze the sky at one moment and recorded which of the two was happening.

Combust and retrograde together is a Mercury and Venus event

A planet is retrograde, which means it appeared from Earth to be moving backwards through the zodiac at the moment you were born. People often ask whether a planet that is both combust and retrograde is doubly afflicted, and the first useful answer is how often the pair can even occur.

On its combust days, Mercury was also retrograde 32.3% of the time and Venus 13.9%. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were retrograde while combust on zero days out of 24,107. That zero is not a gap in the sample. A planet further out from the Sun than the Earth appears to reverse only when the Earth overtakes it, which happens when that planet stands opposite the Sun in the sky, the furthest it ever gets from being combust. The Moon never appears to reverse at all.

So if a chart shows a planet flagged both combust and retrograde, that planet is Mercury or Venus, and for Mercury the combination is common enough to be unremarkable. AstroMedha's engine reports the two flags separately for exactly this reason, since they are different measurements of different things: one is a distance from the Sun, the other is the direction of the planet's apparent motion. Mercury Retrograde in Vedic Astrology covers the second one on its own.

The Neecha Bhanga question, answered directly

People arrive at chart chat holding a verdict from somewhere else and wanting it checked against their own chart. One of the most repeated versions runs like this: my Jupiter and Mars are combust, but I am told my chart carries Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga, so are they severely combust or not?

The two things are separate measurements, and neither one reaches the other.

Combustion is the distance from the Sun. A debilitation is the one sign a planet is rated weakest in. Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga is about a planet standing in that sign, when either the lord of that sign, or the planet that is exalted, meaning strongest, in that same sign, sits in one of the four angular houses. AstroMedha's engine will not admit a planet into that yoga at all unless the planet is debilitated: the sign test runs first, and everything else in the rule is skipped when it fails. Since combustion has nothing to do with which sign a planet occupies, a cancellation that argues about the sign leaves the distance from the Sun exactly where it was.

The 8 May 2000 chart shows both conditions on one planet. Its Saturn stands in Aries, the sign Saturn is rated weakest in, and Mars, which owns Aries, sits in the first house, one of the four angles. That Saturn carries Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga, rated Strong. On the same chart it also sits 2.3° from the Sun against a 15° threshold. Both readings are true at once, and the second one is not softened by the first.

The order the scoring runs in says the same thing. It first places the planet on a rung set by its sign, then subtracts a fixed penalty if the planet is combust. The subtraction happens after the sign has been read, so nothing that acts on the sign can reach it.

What this leaves you with is the number, which is the useful part anyway. In the case people write in about, "Jupiter and Mars are combust" covers everything from a tenth of a degree to sixteen degrees, and the two planets in one chart are rarely at similar depths. Reading the two separations against their 11° and 17° thresholds answers the severity question that the yoga was never going to answer. For the cancellation rule itself, see Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga: The Fall-and-Rise Yoga and What Is Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga?.

What combustion actually describes

A combust planet still acts. What it loses is visibility, because from Earth it is standing in the Sun's glare and cannot be seen. Its results tend to arrive in a form that is hard to see and hard for other people to credit to it, which is a specific and common experience: doing the work and watching the recognition land somewhere else.

That makes the flag useful in advance rather than something to dread. It tells you which department of your life to expect indirect delivery in, and where to keep your own record of what you did instead of assuming the credit will attach itself. Which department it is depends on the house the planet stands in and the houses it owns, which is where a general answer stops and your chart starts.

One more question usually follows: does it ever end? The combustion in your birth chart is a fixed record of one moment and does not change. The sky keeps moving, though, and the Sun catches each planet on a schedule you can count. Averaged over the same 66 years, Mercury spends about 159 days a year inside its threshold, Venus about 57, Mars about 56, Saturn about 33, Jupiter about 27 and the Moon about 24. So a planet that is combust in your birth chart spends most of every year clear of the Sun in the sky above you, and the two facts are about different things: one is the condition it was born into, the other is what the sky is doing this week.

Getting your own numbers

Your separations are free and do not need an account. The How Your Chart Works pages draw your chart from three typed fields, your birth date, time and place, and badge every planet inside its threshold with the exact distance, in the form combust 2.3°. Start with What Each Planet Stands For, which walks all nine one at a time and carries the combustion section, or the house wheel at The 12 Houses in Your Birth Chart, which shows the same badges on whichever planet stands in the room you tap. The free kundli sits alongside them and gives you the rest of the chart, your rising sign, every planet's sign and house, and the planetary period you are running.

The badge gives you the distance. This page gives you the threshold it is being measured against. Put those two together and the severity question is answered, without signing up for anything.

What an account adds is the layer after the number. Saving your chart includes two Chart Chat questions, which read the separation together with the rest of the chart: the house that planet stands in, the houses it owns, its dignity, meaning the strength rating the sign gives it, and the planetary period you are running now. That is what turns "Mercury, 1.3° from the Sun" into an answer about work that is mostly writing and mostly credited to other people. The measurement is the same either way; what changes is whether anything is put next to it.

Questions people ask right after this one

My planet is 14.2° from the Sun and it is not flagged. Is that a mistake? No. The thresholds are hard edges. A chart computed for 25 March 1985, 9:15 am, New Delhi, puts Mercury 14.2° from the Sun against Mercury's 14° threshold, and it is not combust. Two tenths of a degree the other way and the same chart would say combust. This is why the separation is worth reading rather than the flag alone: near the boundary, the label changes and almost nothing else does.

Is a combust planet the same as a weak planet? They are computed separately. Dignity is about the sign a planet occupies and whether that sign is the strongest or weakest one for it. Combustion is about the distance from the Sun and ignores the sign completely. A planet can be strong by sign and combust at the same time, which is why AstroMedha's engine reports the two as separate lines rather than one verdict.

Two of my planets are combust. Is that worse than one? Two is a common configuration rather than a compounded affliction, occurring on 18.7% of the days measured. The pair that turns up most often is Mars with Mercury, then Mercury with Venus. What matters more than the count is which two, how deep each one is, and what those planets are responsible for in your chart.

Does the side of the Sun change the answer? Not for the flag. The engine takes the shorter of the two angles between the planet and the Sun, so a planet 3° ahead and a planet 3° behind get the same reading. The side is still recorded in your chart, since both longitudes are there.

Can the Sun itself be combust? No. Combustion is measured as the distance from the Sun, so for the Sun that distance is always zero and the question has no content. Rahu and Ketu are excluded too, because they are calculated points on the Moon's path rather than bodies that can be lost in a glare.

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Every number on this page was computed by AstroMedha's sidereal Vedic engine, pinned at the same build the site runs on. The distribution figures come from 24,107 daily positions between 1 January 1960 and 31 December 2025, sampled once per calendar day, so they describe how often the sky is in each state rather than a count of people. More on how a chart is put together: Vedic insights.