New Zodiac Sign Dates: Ophiuchus The 13th Sign?
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New zodiac sign Ophiuchus: Why astrology is even sillier than we thought
By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer / January 13, 2011
New zodiac sign Ophiuchus: Thanks to a wobble in the earth's axis, the astrological positions calculated some 2,000 years ago no longer apply. And even back then it was a big load of nonsense.
Since this Ancient Roman zodiac unearthed in Qarat el-Muzawwaqa, Egypt, was created in the 1st or 2nd century AD, the astrology has only gotten more wrong, if that's even possible, thanks to Earth's precession.
If you look to your horoscope for a preview of your day, look again: You're probably following somebody else's supposed fate.
Thanks to Earth's wobble, astrological signs are, well, bunk. (Or even more bunk than you might expect.) Astrological signs are determined by the position of the sun relative to certain constellations on a person's day of birth. The problem is, the positions were determined more than 2,000 years ago. Nowadays, the stars have shifted in the night sky so much that horoscope signs are nearly a month off. [Read: Why Your Horoscope for 2011 Is All Wrong]
"Astrology tells us that the sun is in one position, whereas astronomy tells us it's in another position," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's skywatching columnist and a lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium.
The shift is caused by precession, the wobble in the Earth's axis caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon to the Earth's equator. Precession popped into the spotlight this week after Minnesota Planetarium Society board member Parke Kunkle told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the gap between the astrological and the astronomical view. The story spread around the Internet quickly, but it's actually old news, Rao said.
Very old news.
"The earliest known astronomer to recognize and assess the movement of precession was Aristarchus of Samos, who lived around 280 B.C.," Rao told LiveScience.
The attention triggered by his interview with the newspaper has been "astounding." Kunkle, who teaches astronomy at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, told Livescience, He gave the interview at the request of the paper to discuss precession, and the science he described is centuries old, he said.
"Bombshell dropped?" Kunkle said. "Well, no, not really."
Here's what astronomers know: The Earth is like a wobbly top. As it rotates, its axis swings in a circle, pointing in different directions. As the Earth's position shifts, so does our perspective of the night sky.
For example, Rao said, we take the North Star, Polaris, for granted. It's the star most closely aligned with Earth's North Pole. But back when the pyramids were constructed, the star that aligned with the North Pole wasn't Polaris at all: It was a star in the constellation Draco called Thuban. In 12,000 years, Earth's North Star will be Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra.
The complete rotation takes 26,000 years, Rao said.
"Everything in the sky is in flux," he said.
Even if the astrological signs were stable, there's no evidence the stars have anything to do with people's day-to-day existence. One 2006 study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences used data from more than 15,000 people and found no relationship between date of birth and personality.
There have been talks for decades if Pluto was a planet or not. I remember seeing a whole PBS show on it was when I was like 10. I'm at work and don't care enough to look but you could probably google it and come up with articles, etc stating this that go back well beyond 2006. 2006 must have been when they came up with an official definition I guess.
