Sign of the times: Astrology story soars like a comet
If we had checked our horoscope, maybe we would have seen this coming: Astrology buffs who follow the stars don't like finding out that their world -- and sign -- might have changed.
* Discarded by the Babylonians because they wanted 12 signs per year.
Source: Livescience.com
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If we had checked our horoscope, maybe we would have seen this coming.
A Star Tribune story about zodiac signs needing adjustment because of the Earth's "wobble" went viral Thursday, with postings at Yahoo News, Gawker, Fark, Twitter, Time.com and others sending thousands of people to the Star Tribune's website and creating a hectic day for a Minneapolis astronomer quoted in the story, Parke Kunkle.
"It's been an exhausting hoot," Kunkle said Thursday night, noting that his phone has been ringing constantly from media inquiries.
On Facebook and the comment sections of various websites that picked up the story, there is a mix of:
Defiance: "Parke Kunkle can take my Taurus sign from my cold, dead hands."
Delight: "Upgrade from Cancer to Gemini. Woo!"
Consternation: "If my zodiac symbol has been changed to a Libra, what am I supposed to do with my Scorpio tattoo?!?!"
There also was pushback from those in the astrological world, determined to hang on to the 31 percent of Americans who believe in astrology, according to a recent Harris Poll.
CNN blogger Jason Hanna talked to Jeff Jawer, an astrologer with Tarot.com. He said the article's premise -- that the sun doesn't align with the same constellations as it did millennia ago, when astrology first bubbled up -- is true, but irrelevant to his profession. The tropical zodiac "used in the Western world ... was never oriented to the constellations," Jawer told CNN.
Instead, Jawer said, tropical astrology is based on the seasonal equinoxes, as opposed to the constellation-based sidereal zodiac used in some Western and Hindu circles.
Some websites mistakenly attributed the hubbub to new "research" done by Kunkle, but he was just commenting, at the Star Tribune's request, to a posting by Robert Roy Britt at LiveScience (www.livescience.com/strangenews/etc/horoscope-2011-astrology-sign.html) about a subject that goes back thousands of years.
The ancient Babylonians based zodiac signs on the constellation the sun was "in" on the day a person was born. Tropical astronomy, devised by Ptolemy in 170 A.D., uses constellations, as well, but the period of time that the sun is "in" these constellations varies markedly from the dates in your daily horoscope.
And that's not even including the omission of Ophiuchus, which "hosts" the sun for more than twice as long as Scorpio. (See the accompanying calendar.)
Since the zodiac periods were established millennia ago, the moon's gravitational pull has made the Earth "wobble" around its axis in a process called precession. That has created about a one-month bump in the stars' alignment.
The result? "When [astrologers] say that the sun is in Pisces, it's really not in Pisces," said Kunkle, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society.
Indeed, most horoscope readers who consider themselves Pisces are actually Aquarians. So instead of being sensitive, humane and idealistic, they actually are friendly, loyal and inventive.
There is no physical connection between constellations and personality traits, said Kunkle, who teaches astronomy at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. "Sure, we can connect harvest to the stars," he said. "But personality? No."
Astronomers have pooh-poohed astrology for centuries, but Kunkle hedged when asked if astrology can bring people to his science.
"Historically, people looked at the sky to understand the world around us," he said. "But today I don't think people who are into astrology look at the sky very much."
But they do look at horoscopes. And now they have an explanation for why a day might not have turned out exactly as predicted.
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