For those people out there who don’t know what all the commotion is about, it all started with an astronomer out in Minnesota (I know, random) who mentioned something about a commonly accepted astronomical phenomenon in an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Parke Kunkie, a member of the board of directors of the Minnesota Planetarium Society and astronomy professor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, told the Star-Tribune that the Earth’s relation to the Sun has changed since the Babylonians first created the zodiac. THIS IS NOT A NEW STORY!
Astronomers and astrologers alike have known about this phenomenon since Hipparchus first realized it occurred back around 130 BC!
- that’s a millennium and a half before most people accepted that the Earth was round or realized that the Earth was not the center of the solar system.
The story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was a poorly written article that has snowballed to insane proportions; Twitter and and other social media, and of course, modern day journalism (such as the Daily Mail) - who were of course the first newspaper to get hold of the information which is over 1000 years old!
The twelve commonly accepted zodiac signs were selected out of the 88 constellations because they basically form a line through the sky. If you look at this sky chart you can see the curve that the bold zodiac constellations make through the sky, this curve follows what astronomers know as the ecliptic plane, or the plane of our Solar System (that dashed line running through the bold constellations in the chart).
The orbits of all of the planets in our solar system occupy basically the same plane in space due to the conservation of angular momentum as the solar system formed. Because of this fact, when we look out at the Sun and other planets in plane of the solar system from Earth they appear to follow a line through the sky, the ecliptic.
Now Earth doesn’t sit exactly straight; in fact, the 23.5 degree tilt of its rotation axis with respect to the ecliptic plane is what causes the different seasons on Earth
We all know that the Earth rotates like a top on its axis once every 24+ hours, but think about what happens as you spin a top. First, you start with a nice tight spin, but as the spin starts to slow, the top begins to loosen the tightness of its spin and "precess" outwards before it falls; this is what Earth’s rotation is doing because of the gravitational effects of the Moon, Sun, and other planets.
Because the stars in the sky are in a fixed position with respect to Earth (for the most part over extremely long time periods) we don’t see them move in relation to one another and the stars and the constellations themselves won’t change as the Earth’s orbit precesses.
What will change though throughout the 26,000 year cycle of the precession of the Earth’s axis is how the stars seem to move through the sky. The north and south celestial poles are imaginary lines which extend out into space along Earth’s rotational axis; they indicate the point in space around which the sky seems to rotate every night.
The north celestial pole points almost directly at Polaris, the North Star. It’s because Polaris sits so close to the north celestial pole that it is so special; it does not move in the night sky as the Earth rotates under it (and the rest of the stars in the sky appear to move around it). But the north celestial pole hasn’t always pointed towards Polaris and it won’t continue to; in other words, Polaris isn’t always the North Star.
Over time, as Earth’s rotational axis precesses, instead of the stars appearing to rotate around Polaris, they’ll appear to rotate around other stars and for most of the time no particular star at all.
So yeah, I'm not going to go delve into it anymore.. I suggest you look into astrology, before you believe the rumour mill of Twitter and the Daily Mail.
However, if it does happen, and we magically get a 13th Zodiac, I take all this back, and will probably lose all faith in astrology which I have had a great interest in since I can remember.. You have my word.
