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 yet, several of the chosen 12 didn’t fit cleanly into their designated pie slice and crossed over into the next.
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Is it possible for a person’s zodiac sign to change?
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 shift is really slow,” Montfar explains.
How often do the signs of the zodiac change?
“It slews slowly around in a circle every 26,000 years, much like a spinning top wobbling around on a table. On a daily timescale, this additional motion is nearly undetectable, but it mounts up over millennia.” So, while the stars do not move, they appear to move over centuries.
Do the signs of the zodiac change throughout time?
According to TIME, astronomers from the Minnesota Planetarium Society discovered that the alignment of the stars has varied as a result of the moon’s gravitational influence on Earth, causing the sun to point to various sections of the zodiac at different times.