The first reason is that it’s a lie

First of all, it is useful to understand that NASA is an astronomy agency not astrology. The first is a science based on evidence and observations, and the second is an esoteric teaching based on the belief that the positions of planets and stars can somehow influence our lives and control events and the destiny of people.

Any scientist will tell you that astrology is a fabrication created by the ancients to explain things that they could not understand in a time without science and technology. But if we don’t understand something, that doesn’t mean we’re dealing with magic. One law, called Clarke’s Laws, states that any sufficiently advanced technology for underdeveloped cultures is indistinguishable from magic. The same can be said for natural phenomena. We can see a similar principle at the basis of the formation of religions: Primitive people, who could not explain lightning, flood, earthquake, rain and other events, invented gods for themselves and attributed dominion over all these forces in nature to them.

To summarize, you may notice that in such news already lies a lie in the headline itself: NASA can’t introduce new horoscopes because scientists don’t believe in astrology.

This is because two

If you look carefully at the page that some Ukrainian media cite as the source of the information, you can see that it leads to the children’s encyclopedic site NASA Space Place. It is designed to explain space to children, to involve them in thematic games, practical activities and generally to motivate them to do science. The source news is not intended for publication.

Even the very specific article the authors refer to no mention of adding a new zodiac sign it may even be a new constellation, for it has all been described and described for a long time. And yes, they are much more than 12. The material in the source provides only general information about what the constellation is and how NASA uses them in their work, from a scientific point of view only. in it too The word “Ophiuchus” is never mentioned (Translated as “Ophiuchus”) – it was this sign that NASA allegedly added to the zodiac.

We can only see Ophiuchus in the single image added to the article. Here it is:

Constellations through which the Sun passes throughout the year / Photo NASA

However, this chart does not show the zodiac signs. It shows which constellations the Sun passes through the ecliptic during the year. We’ll get back to that in one of the paragraphs below, where we’ll explain what all this means and why Ophiuchus is nothing new, it’s literally thousands of years old.

Third reason

Even posts about NASA adding horoscopes are wrong. This can be easily checked from the agency’s official sources: Not a word on the website, Twitter/X or Facebook just about the horoscope but about the addition of a new constellation.

Moreover, this “news” does not appear in any Western mass media. It was written only in Ukraine and in the Ukrainian section of social networks.

Who is Ophiuchus?

So let’s find out what’s causing this whole situation.

The zodiac has only one point of contact with science: it uses an astronomical observation; accordingly, the Sun travels a certain visible path across the sky throughout the year and is constantly visible in the background of some stars.

When we look at these stars, we can create shapes by drawing certain imaginary lines between them. These are the constellations; some traditional drawings showing the combination of only visible sky stars in the sky. But these stars are not soon. They are at different distances both from Earth and from each other. There are millions or even billions of light years between them, but for us these are projected onto a single plane, allowing us to form constellations.

Astrologers took advantage of these observations and assigned magical interpretations to each constellation and agreed to consider a person as belonging to the sign in which the Sun was located on the day he was born.

Generally speaking, from a scientific point of view, the Sun passes through 13 constellations throughout the year, but man has described and named as many as 88 constellations. Have you ever heard of the names Fly, Cutter, Cepheus, Furnace, Keel? These are just some of them. Among the most famous we can mention the Great Dipper, Chariot, Volopas, Hercules, Hydra, Eridan, Cygnus, Perseus, Orion, Sextant and Phoenix.

This list also includes the usual 12 zodiac constellations (Pisces, Taurus, Aries, Aquarius and others) that created this whole storm, as well as the aforementioned Ophiuchus.

From the depths of the ages

The first mentions of the zodiac date back to ancient Babylon and are thousands of years old. Later, the ancients described and named several constellations, including Ophiuchus, but decided not to add it to the zodiac and confirmed only 12 signs in the full list; it was probably related to the 12-month calendar or what they were doing at the time. He divided the sky into 12 equal parts of 30 degrees. However, the Sun also passes through this sign from November 30 to December 18.

As you know, the stars are incredibly far from us, even near us. They are so far away that we can only see them as tiny points of light. Because everything in space moves (clusters of galaxies, galaxies and the individual stars in them, and even the planets themselves) change their tilts, the sky is constantly changing. The picture of the starry sky that the ancient Babylonians saw more than 3,000 years ago does not match what we have now. This means that the number of days the Sun spends in certain constellations slowly changes over time. For a short human lifespan this is unnoticeable, but on a historical scale it is worth paying attention to.

In 2020, NASA published a response to another hectic conversation (yes, we said this happens regularly) about the thirteenth sign of the zodiac. scientists have only made calculations to update the actual time of stay of the Sun in this or that constellation..

The problem is that the inventors of the zodiac still ignored this by devoting an equal amount of time to all constellations, such as Ophiuchus, that the Sun spends a different amount of time in each sign because of the different sizes of the constellations, and that some signs don’t fit in their allotted piece of sky.

A line drawn from Earth to Sun shows Virgo for 45 days and Scorpio for 7 days only. The Babylonians ignored the fact that the Sun actually passed through 13 constellations, not 12, to get a clear fit with their 12-month calendar. They then allocated equal time to each of these 12 constellations.
– Wrote at NASA.

That is, the space agency did not change anything, only made calculations, but modern people perceive this as changes in magical horoscopes, invented by an extinct human thousands of years ago.

In fact, NASA makes it clear that it disagrees with astrologers, even by publishing images of the ecliptic and 13 constellations. While scientists refer to scientific data showing the Sun passing through Ophiuchus, astrology ignores it. However, this does not mean that scientists are trying to somehow change the zodiac teaching itself.