Have you noticed you've been feeling a little differently lately? Perhaps you used to be curious and indecisive. Now suddenly you're making rash decisions and not feeling any twinges of curiosity.
Two explanations arise. One is that you're a normal person who feels many things and acts in diverse ways. The other is that your astrological sign has changed, and our individual and collective identities have fractured irreparably.
It's obviously the latter, because NASA went ahead and recalculated the zodiac
to not only change our star signs, but to also add a new one we didn't even
know existed. Perhaps that's why you saw the internet
freaking
out
that NASA turned our personalities inside out.
One issue.
We don't necessarily have to get into the nitty-gritty of
whether astrology is "real" or not, but rest assured that even if it
was (it's not), NASA is not in charge of it. In fact, as NASA points out on the
very page that everyone was citing as source, "Astrology is not
astronomy." NASA studies astronomy, which is a science. Astrology is
what your flaky friend does to justify the super unreliable guys she chooses to
date.
But let's humor your friend and talk about how astrology "works,"
but from an astronomical perspective. Your zodiac sign is determined by
imagining a straight line drawn between Earth, the sun and whatever
constellation the line points to on your birthday.
So now that we've established that, let's dive into what
NASA wrote about. The essay explained that the zodiac was based on the
Babylonians' understanding of the world, three millennia prior. They created
the zodiac for their convenience, using a 12-month calendar based on moon
phases and leaving out a 13th sign that didn't "fit." The zodiac was
also created using the physical placement of Earth 3,000 years ago. NASA named Ophiuchus
as the 13th constellation that the Babylonians recognized, and pointed out that
our star signs have actually changed over the course of a few thousand years.
What did NASA not do? Try to "reconfigure" the
zodiac or "add" another sign. Because Earth's axis has shifted a bit,
the vertical line between Earth, the sun and the constellation isn't pointing
in the same direction it used to. So while the Babylonians looked up to see one
constellation on a specific date, we might be seeing quite another. NASA was
just explaining astronomy, in other words.
