Why did your zodiac sign change? We asked the astronomer who started it all [Mad Astronomy]

The web is burning up with the inside track that the zodiac has been rearranged. There’s a 13th sign, Ophiuchus, and those that think they’re Virgos are actually Leos. What happened here? We talked to the astronomer who caused the fuss.

Today, Time , MSNBC and lots of other online news outlets are buzzing in regards to the ” new” horoscope. The articles are filled with vague explanations like, ” The star doctors say Earth right away is in a completely different spot on the subject of the sun and its equatorial alignment than it was 3,000 years ago.” Or: ” Due to the moon’s gravitational pull on the earth, the alignment of the celebrities was pushed by about a month.”

What on the planet is happening? And why does everybody suddenly ought to work with a new edition of the completely meaningless zodiac?

It seems to have started with this newsletter within the Minneapolis Star-Tribune last weekend, during which one astronomer made some statements in regards to the zodiac. Parke Kunkle is on the board of directors of the Minnesota Planetarium Society and teaches astronomy at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. Kunkle told the Star-Tribune the Earth’s relation to the sun had changed since the Babylonians first created the zodiac.

We got involved with Kunkle and asked him what he actually told the Star-Tribune. He said he was asked by the Star-Tribune to provide them a number of bits of knowledge about astronomy, not realizing the object would become a massive discussion of astrology and the relationship between astronomy and astrology. And the major stuff he talked to the Star-Tribune about has to do with the phenomenon of ” precession .”

Says Kunkle:

If you are taking a toy top and spin it, it spins around an axis and that axis tends to point in several directions. It moves around. That’s what we call precession. So in Earth’s case, straight away, Earth’s spin axis points towards Polaris, the North Star. But in 3000 BC, the Earth’s axis pointed towards yet another star, Thuban . And that majestic motion takes about 26,000 years. so in the event you went from 3,000 B.C. and waited 26,000 years, you’d have the north star Thuban again.

This phenomenon was first noticed around 130 B.C. by a Greek astronomer, Hipparchus of Nicea. And consequently, in case you actually take a look at what stars were positioned behind the sun on a selected date, that could were very different 5,000 years ago than it might today. ” We’re in one more constellation now and it is the average sun sign,” based on the sun’s position after you were born.

And no, Parke Kunkle didn’t tell the Star-Tribune that the zodiac need to include 13 signs as opposed to 12 – especially since he doesn’t believe in astrology at all. (He highly recommends Phil Plait’s page about astrology .) He did mention that astronomers are inclined to reckon the sun’s position with 13 constellations rather than 12, and Ophiuchus is the 13th. But within the current astrology zodiac, there are just 12. ” I just mentioned that it’s there, and astronomers actually count it… So in the event you actually watch the celebs inside the background of the sun, it actually does wade through the constellation of Ophiuchus.” He adds that the Babylonians probably had different constellations anyway.

Somehow, Kunkle’s brief comments inside the Star-Tribune article got morphed into ” astronomer says the zodiac should be revamped.” As various people have talked about, this implies the entire personality is different than what you originally believed it was – you are flighty in preference to hard-working, or fishy in preference to scorpionesque. Taylor Swift is an Ophiuchus !

Such is the ability that astronomers wield over all our fates.

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This post is tagged: babylonians, gravitational pull, minneapolis community and technical college, minneapolis star tribune, star tribune