Ofiuco, new sign of the zodiac?

The zodiac has been on trend in recent days after it was claimed that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has recognized Ofiuco as the number 13 sign.

However, it should be remembered that this controversy is not recent and this statement has been handled for years, in addition to the American public body has a different opinion than that which has been handled on social media.

“We see his comments on a zodiac story that reappears every few years. No, we don’t change the zodiac,” it was reported on his Twitter account last July, though that 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 emphasized through the blog in which it tries to explain what happened to Ofiuco.

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.

The two words have an etym that comes from the Greek term aster, which means star, but in its second particle is the difference: one is composed of logos (word, expression, treatise), while the other has nomos (rule, norm, order).

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

We do not change any sign of the zodiac: NASA

What the National Aeronautics and Space Administration did was do some calculations, but not change a zodiac sign.

In his report it was mentioned that it was the Babylonians who invented the constellations 3 thousand years ago and they were the ones who chose to omit the sign of the zodiac number 13, which would be between Scorpio and Sagittarius. .

To explain what a constellation and the zodiac is NASA invited to do an exercise:

“Imagine a straight line drawn from the Earth through the sun and into space far beyond our solar system, where the stars are. Then imagine the Earth following its orbit around the Sun. This imaginary line would rotate, pointing at different stars along a complete journey around the Sun, or a year.All stars that are close to the imaginary flat disk swept by this imaginary line are said to be in the zodiac. “.

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

The Babylonians and Ofiuco

As already mentioned, it was the Babylonians who ruled that the zodiac had 12 parts, thus choosing 12 constellations after they already had a 12-month calendar.

In this way it was that when having 13 constellations originally they chose to leave out Ofiuco, and in spite of that some signs did not fit perfectly.

NASA indicated that together with this everything has changed, as after 3,000 years the sky has moved because the Nasa ejea of ​​Earth does not point in the same direction, causing the constellations to have different sizes and shapes. .

“So we didn’t change any signs of the zodiac … we just did the calculations,” NASA argued.

He added that of the 12 family constellations, the Sun also aligns with Ofiuco for approximately 18 days a year.