“If you don’t like your star sign, make up a constellation.”
This was the advice given by Dr. Ethan Deneault, assistant professor of physics and UT’s local astronomer.
Last week The Minaret ran a piece about the recent stir that began over the zodiac when astronomer Paul Kunkle said in a CNN interview that the constellations no longer matched up.
People latched onto this information and all over the nation the misinformed have been up in arms over the idea that their zodiacs had changed.
“I think that [Kunkle] is very surprised by this,” said Dr. Deneault.
“He was giving some information on historical astronomy. I think he forgot to mention that the constellations, traditionally, are vastly different from the standardized 88 regions by the IAU.”
The IAU stands for the International Astronomical Union. In 1930, they standardized and set up the night sky into 88 different regions.
Each region gets its own constellation. Before 1930, there were a myriad of additional and unneeded constellations.
This is quite different from how the constellations were configured several thousand years ago. It’s not the stars that have changed, just the shapes we see amongst them.
If there was a blank part of the sky, a constellation would be made up. Astrometers, those who map the night sky, “would assign constellations and just make [things] up.” said Dr. Deneault.
“This is the staff of King George!”
But the IAU’s standardization of the night sky is a fairly recent thing.
The zodiac’s “changes” have been going on for a long time.
“The path that the sun travels on day by day is known the as ‘ecliptic,’” explained Dr. Deneault.
“The rising position of the sun changes each day and so the path has changed over the past 20,000 years. The ancient Greeks knew about it.”
“Over a 24,000 year cycle, the constellations that the ecliptic pass through will change.”
And they have been changing. Which constellation the sun is in on the day you are born no longer matches up with where it was when the zodiacs were first configured.
And this is exactly where the recent craze started with people believing their zodiacs had changed.
But that is not the case. Just because astrological constellations differ from the astronomical does not mean you have a different star sign.
“It depends on how you want to define what a constellation is and how you measure, date-wise, where the sun is.
“An astrologer says you’re a Scorpio because you were born November 8. But on November 8 the sun is Libra.
“Astrologers will say you’re a Scorpio anyway. In Western astrology, which is the tropical zodiac, there are 12 houses of the night sky.
“Saying the sun is in Taurus is no different from saying the sun is in the month of May… your sign depends on where the sun is in a specific house, in a specific month, not where the sun is in relation to the stars.”
In other words, according to Western astrology, your star sign is wholly dependant on the date, not on where the sun is. So rest easy, everyone who’s been concerned that their sign hasn’t changed; it hasn’t.
Dr. Deneault has been frustrated over the media’s coverage of Kunkle’s words and the public reaction to them.
Apparently he isn’t the only one.
Astronomers and astrologers typically don’t get along, but here they do.
“Astronomy is a science. We’re predictive, we have data that can backup our predictions, we can follow a nice scientific process that gets us reproducible results. Astrology, on the other hand, is a religious or sacred system. It’s not necessarily predictive,” said Dr. Deneault.
“Astronomers get pissed-off at astrology because some astrologers claim to be scientific, even if they’re obviously not. But astrologers use the same basic data as astronomers: the stars.”
In two vastly different professions that don’t agree and don’t get along, both are saying that nothing has changed, nothing has happened to the zodiacs and that all this talk is old news.
Dr. Deneault put it another way: “There’s a rift there. We don’t talk to one another. It would be akin to any other major religion having to change all of its precepts because some scientist decided to define a particular quantity.”
We have the astrologers, the devout believers, saying your zodiac has changed. We have the astronomers, the scientists, saying that nothing new is going on with the zodiac. But most people still believe their sign has changed.
“Your sign hasn’t changed; no ones sign has changed; no one’s birth time has changed. This hasn’t affected a damn thing,” said Dr. Deneault.
Richard Solomon can be reached at richard.solomon@spartans.ut.edu.