Photo Credits: PG1. SECOND LEAD
NASA did not just rewrite the zodiac chart. But here’s why so many people are convinced that the agency did—and the real story behind the rumor. The story that NASA had issued a new zodiac appeared in Cosmopolitan’s UK edition recently, but it quickly spread, with Yahoo, AOL, and more all soon carrying stories claiming that NASA had issued a new zodiac chart that added a 13th sign called Ophiuchus and shifted around dates for the other twelve signs. On twitter and facebook, people were sharing these links and hardcore horoscope followers were probably having a heart attack.
But, to anyone paying attention, though, the weirdest part of the story isn’t the moving zodiac, it’s that NASA is suddenly writing horoscopes. Remain calm, though, there hasn’t been some shift in the agency’s mission. NASA studies astronomy not astrology. So why are astrologers convinced that NASA is suddenly helping them re-calibrate horoscopes? Strangely, the source of the rumor appears to stem from a bizarre misinterpretation of an educational page the agency put out for kids. Cosmo and the other sites all link to a real NASA page as the source for their news. What absolutely does not appear on the linked page, though, is any recalculation of the zodiac. Instead, NASA offers an explanation to curious kids that the zodiac signs were made up 3,000 years ago by the Babylonians, who linked them to the constellations they saw above. In the thousands of years since then, though, the agency notes that the position of those constellations has shifted, due to a tiny wobble in the Earth’s axis. This means that those constellations are no longer in the same spots today as they were when the ancient Babylonians were looking up.
Just how this information was twisted into NASA attempting to retool the zodiac is still honestly pretty baffling. For now, just know that despite what you may have read out on the internet this week, NASA still has absolutely no interest in your zodiac sign.
