In a tweet on July 16, 2020, NASA clarified that the zodiac had not been altered. The text of the tweet is as follows: “Your comments on a zodiac narrative that resurfaces every few years have caught our attention. No, the zodiac has not been altered. The Babylonians elected to leave out a 13th sign when they created the constellations 3,000 years ago. So, we crunched the numbers.”
The tweet includes a link to a NASA Tumblr page, which goes into greater detail about the story and distinguishes between astronomy and astrology. Astronomy is “the scientific study of everything in outer space,” while astrology is “the belief that the positions of stars and planets can influence human events.”
The Babylonians, who lived over 3,000 years ago, split the zodiac into 12 divisions and chose constellations for each, which corresponded to the 12 months of the calendar, according to the Wikipedia.
“However, there were 13 constellations in the zodiac according to ancient Babylonian tales. So they chose Ophiuchus to be the one to be left out. Even then, several of the chosen 12 didn’t fit cleanly into their designated pie slice and crossed into the next.”
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Do the signs of the zodiac change every year?
Is that to say that your zodiac sign changes each year? No, it’s more like once every 30 years or so. (Thank G, you’ve got some time to think about it.) “Each sign has 30 degrees, and the advanced sun moves less than a degree per year, so this movement is quite slow,” Montfar explains.
When a leap year occurs, do the zodiac dates change?
We add an extra day to the year every four years to keep the calendars we developed in sync with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the seasons.
The Earth’s orbit around the Sun takes about 365.25 days, and the extra 0.25 days equals an extra day every four years, hence the leap year.
The zodiac seasons are defined by where the Sun is at the moment of your birth, not by our calendar, and the leap year takes this into account as well.
“The sky is a 360-degree circle, but there are 365 days in a year, so we have a leap year to account for that,” Francesca explained.
What causes astrological dates to shift?
The wobble in the Earth’s rotation is to blame for this. “As a result, the dates at which the Sun seems to move in front of each backdrop constellation of stars have changed by a few days during the previous two thousand years,” explains Dr Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
What is the maximum number of zodiac signs a person can have?
Each of the zodiac’s 12 astrological signs is said to occupy 1/12 (or 30) of its vast circle. These symbols no longer match to the astrological constellations where the Sun can be found.