Ophiuchus, new sign of the zodiac?

The zodiac has been on trend in recent days after getting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, for its acronym in English) to recognize Ophiuchus as the sign number 13.

However, it should be remembered that this controversy is not recent and this statement has been covered for several years, and in addition that the North American public body has a different opinion from that on social networks.

We see your comments on a zodiac story that reappears every few years. No, we are not changing the zodiac, ”was reported on his Twitter account last July, although this story has a bigger past.

What is the difference between Astronomy and Astrology?

It never hurts to remember that astronomy and astrology are two very different things from each other, a fact that NASA itself has highlighted through the blog where it tries to explain what happened to Ophiuchus.

Astrology is a set of beliefs in which celestial events have a meaning in people’s lives, while astronomy is a science that studies the structure and composition of the stars.

Both words have an etym that comes from the Greek terms aster, meaning star, but in the second particle is the difference: one is composed of logos (word, phrase, treatise), while the other has nouns (rule, norm , to order).

Thus, astronomy and its scientists “know that stars many light years away have no effect on the normal activities of humans on Earth,” the NASA report states.

We’re not changing a constellation: NASA

What the National Aeronautics and Space Administration did was do some calculations, but don’t change the sign of the zodiac.

His report stated that it was the Babylonians who invented the constellations 3,000 years ago and it was they who chose to omit the constellation number 13, which would stand between Scorpio and Sagittarius.

To explain what a constellation and the zodiac are, NASA has invited you to do an exercise:

Imagine a straight line drawn from Earth through the sun and into space far beyond our solar system, where the stars are. Then imagine that the Earth follows its orbit around the sun. This imaginary line would rotate and point to different stars on a full journey around the sun, or a year. All the stars near the imaginary flat disk swept by this imaginary line are called in the zodiac. “

He also wrote that merging the points of the stars and using the imagination is that you can see shapes of objects, animals and people.

The Babylonians and Ophiuchus

As mentioned earlier, it was the Babylonians who ruled that the zodiac had 12 parts and thus chose 12 constellations after already having a 12-month calendar.

It was in this way that, with 13 constellations, they originally chose to omit Ophiuchus, and nevertheless some signs didn’t fit perfectly.

NASA also indicated that everything has changed, because after 3,000 years the sky has moved because the NASA axis of the Earth does not point in the same direction, so the constellations have different sizes and shapes.

“So we didn’t change constellations … we just did the calculations,” NASA said.

He added that of the 12 family constellations, the sun also aligns with Ophiuchus about 18 days a year.