- 44 Common Misconceptions About Astronomy - Physics, Astronomy & Geology - Sacramento City College
- Astronomy vs. Astrology: What’s the Difference?
- Navigation menu
- Astrology and astronomy
Over a period of something between three and four thousand years, astronomy and astrology were not rivals or competitors but two sides of the same coin, Siamese twins joined at the hip only separated in the final phases of the so-called scientific revolution.
Continuing to observe over a longer period, they noticed that the stars revolved in regular circles and a handful of special ones, the planets, weaved a sort of regular path through the others. Awed by this majestic display of dancing lights, they began to wonder if they in some way influenced or controlled life on the earth down below.
However, to determine that influence the observers had to track the patterns of those celestial objects and so astronomy was born. The Babylonians developed their study of the stars and their influences reaching a point where they could accurately follow the paths of the planets and predict with accuracy eclipses of the moon, all done with algebraic algorithms.
These extraordinary achievements in what we call astronomy were all driven by the Babylonian obsession with what we call astrology.
In the second half of the first millennium BCE the ancient Greeks adopted the whole package, astrology and astronomy, from their Babylonian neighbours. Shifting from algebraic to geometrical models the Greeks continued to develop astronomy, like the Babylonians, in the service of astrology. In the former, Ptolemy wrote that the science of the stars has two aspects, one that determines the position of the stars and the other that determines their influence.
We would call the first astronomy and the second astrology, but from the time when the Greeks took over the disciplines from the Babylonians down to the seventeenth century, the two terms were used indiscriminately for either of its two branches or both together. Following Ptolemy, learning in general went into decline in Europe and with it astronomy.
When during the Early Middle Ages astronomy was kept afloat, even if only on a very low level, it was because of a continuing interest in astrology.
However, both disciplines were kept more than just alive outside of Europe in the Islamic Empire. The story of how the young Islamic Empire began to search out and translate Greek knowledge into Arabic in the eighth century CE is legendary.
What however is less well known is that that process was led by astrology. The Abbasid Caliphate was centred on what had been the Persian Empire, and courts had employed an astrologer as a political advisor.
As part of their campaign to bring the Persians onto their side, the Abbasids adopted this practice, and the first Greek texts that they rendered into Arabic were astrological ones. This was followed by the translation of astronomical, mathematical and philosophical treatises to underpin the astrological ones.
This process was mirrored in the High Middle Ages when Europeans began to translate Arabic scientific texts into Latin. And at this point in time there existed the possibility of a break in the duality of astrology and astronomy.
The central intellectual authority in Europe was the Catholic Church. However, instead of simply throwing out astrology, the Church redefined it.
Astrology was no longer deterministic but only indicative; the individual or God was capable of changing the prognosticated future. And so astronomer and astrology continued to march through history arm in arm.
Astrology reached a high point in its existence during the humanist Renaissance through the rise of astrological medicine or iatromathematics as it was called , to become the dominant form of school medicine. According to this theory, the cause of an ailment, its course and its cure could all be determined by casting and interpreting a horoscope.
With this, astrology entered the Renaissance university. In the early fifteenth century, chairs for mathematics were established in the Northern Italian humanist Renaissance universities and at the university of Krakow. These chairs existed to teach astrology and the casting of horoscopes to students of medicine. To do astrology one needed to do astronomy, and to do astronomy one needed mathematics, therefore chairs for mathematics.
In about Germany got its first chair for mathematics at the University of Ingolstadt, established for the same purpose. And so the teaching of astronomy and astrology spread through the European universities. In the Reformation, the Lutheran Protestant Church needed to set up its own education system, as the existing schools and universities were controlled by the Catholic Church.
Philipp Melanchthon was entrusted with this task.
44 Common Misconceptions About Astronomy - Physics, Astronomy & Geology - Sacramento City College
Starting in , Melanchthon established chairs of mathematics in all the Protestant schools and universities in order to ensure a steady supply of future astrologers. Starting in the thirteenth century, European ruling courts followed the Arabic and Persian custom to employ court astrologers as advisors.
At that time, go outside. Now, turn around and look to the southern sky. Do you see anything brighter than the stuff in the northern sky? Odds are you will. In the days pre-GPS, Polaris was important for navigation because of its location in the sky, not its brightness. All the sky turns around that point or its equivalent in the southern sky — the South Celestial Pole.
Since the NCP is pretty important in finding your way, Polaris is important by association. Comet do change in appearance spectacularly as they approach the Sun. Once the comet moves far from the Sun, it stops melting and becomes an undistinguished lump of weird ices including the type of ice we all know and love.
If you live in Sacramento and want to look through a telescope, check out our Observatory schedule. One object that almost always disappoints, however, is Mars. This is because Mars is very small and usually far away.
Consider that one hundred years ago, some observers thought canal networks built by advanced peaceful Martians crisscrossed Mars. It took sending robot probes to Mars to give us our first good views of Mars. The Earth is only half-lit by the Sun at any time, why should the Moon be different?
The shadow of Earth does cross the Moon during a lunar eclipse, but this can only happen during a full moon — when the Earth can get in the way between the Sun and Moon. It also only happens at most, a couple times a year. To a math phobic person, astrology might seem like a science because it uses extensive math to calculate things like planet positions and hour angles.
Astronomy, on the other hand is a science — not because of its use of math, but because it creates testable ideas about the Universe. Astronomers then go out and test those ideas. Some turn out to be based in reality, but many more do not. Some ideas however, have stayed in the junk pile for centuries.
Astrology is one such idea. Astrology has been tested extensively in the 20 th century and has failed again and again and again. It makes more sense to think of Astrology as a very old religion that requires math skills if you practice it — as opposed to just believing in it which requires no math.
This idea is more common in the Eastern U. This is partly because out west or in any dry climate most people see colors in stars. But whether you live in Boston or Santa Barbara, if you view a star through a telescope you will see color. Some stars like Betelgeuse in Orion have a clearly orange color. It has to do with human eyes.
Our eyes have two types of cells that absorb light, one sees color and the other can see in very faint light. This is why colors disappear in the dark. For very bright stars or planets, the color seeing cells in our eyes do have enough light to work with and this lets us perceive color. Mars looks red compared to Jupiter for example, but it is a subtle difference.
But they are not gravitational vacuum cleaners that suck in everything around them. Like any star, things can orbit them. If the orbiting thing is far enough away about as far as Jupiter is from the Sun , it can have a stable orbit that lasts for a very long time. The only danger near black holes occurs if there is a disk of crap around the black hole.
This disk has stuff that is slowly falling into the black hole. An orbiting planet plowing through the stuff in a disk would slow down and later become part of the disk after being shredded like pasta and fall into the black hole with all the other stuff. If the black hole has no such disk, then it could have planets or another star stably orbiting it until the end of the Universe.
Earth is a dynamic planet planets are astronomy that has a number of plates in its crust. These plates move around in a process called Plate Tectonics.
Many people think that when plates move, holes in the crust open up and swallow people. Plates move very slowly — at about the rate your fingernails grow — and although they hit each other like bumper cars and get pushed up and down, the changes are very slow.
California is not going to sink into the ocean.
In addition, the plate boundary going through California is a sliding boundary, not one where the plates are being pushed together or pulled apart. Over the billions of years we know plate tectonics has been operating on Earth, continental plates have always been taller than ocean plates. They stay taller, too.
The basic continental plates have been around a long time, although they move and change their shape over the eons: Stars are stars because they fuse hydrogen in their cores into helium see Sunpower.
This gives stars the energy they need to fight against the force of gravity, which keeps stars from becoming one-shot fusion bombs. Stars then start fusing helium to keep going. At this point they are large and cooler than they were — Red Giants and such — and already dying.
More massive stars will fuse elements beyond helium — carbon, oxygen, neon, magnesium and silicon. Massive stars collapse within seconds after iron fusion starts then they explode as supernovas. Like the mythical swan song, the explosion of light that is a supernova is the death flash of a massive star. We see much evidence of white dwarves, neutron stars and black holes, so we know there are dead stars.
Like humans — stars are born, live, then die.
For centuries, astronomers thought that if there was any gas or dust in space it was few and far between. Because of this, they misunderstood how much stuff is between us and the center of our Galaxy — among other things.
With the 20th century and radio astronomy, the amount of stuff between the stars became hard to miss. The problem comes when we think: We now have much more respect for clouds of crap than we used to.
Astronomy vs. Astrology: What’s the Difference?
When you see a nebula, the density of it is very low, but the volume of the space it occupies is enormous — thousands to millions of cubic light years! As mentioned above see Astrology and Astronomy , people that persist in making excuses to maintain ideas that have failed testing are not doing science.
There are those who claim evidence to support a young Universe and therefore a young Earth. These people often quote scientists to support their claims. Since almost all people pushing this idea have a flamingly obvious agenda, this claim is not taken seriously by scientists.
No more so than dismissing claims by some people — still made today — that Earth is actually flat. So what about the evidence that the Universe is ancient? Based on the expansion of the Universe, you can make a crude guess as to when it all started based on the speed at which it now expands.
From this, the Universe is between 10 billion and 20 billion years old. Next, we can see the echo of the Big Bang in the Cosmic Background Radiation which is a kind of glowing leftover from that unimaginably violent event.
Recent examinations of this glow tell us that the Universe is about We have a good understanding of how stars work, how long they live and when they will die see Eternal stars. We can build star models from this to estimate star ages.
Navigation menu
All around us in the Galaxy are many stars of ages from the newly born to the dying or even dead. The measurable features that we look for in stars of certain ages agree with the predictions of our star models.
From this, we know that the Sun is about 4. Meteorites can be dated radiometrically just like Earth rocks, and the oldest ones found so far including rocks brought back from the Moon are about 4. The point of all this is that the Universe, Sun, Moon and the planet beneath your feet are billions of years old.
Perhaps there are species out there who have been around since the formation of the Sun. Few people think that each planet is alike, but some folks think that the basic stuff planets are made out of is the same.
But giant planets are different in quality as well as quantity. Worlds distant from the Sun are more ice than rock because at very cold temperatures, ice is common and very strong.
Giant planets, however, are more like stars than rocky worlds.
- Astrology vs Astronomy: What's the Difference? | Sky & Telescope.
- Astronomy and Astrology: The Siamese Twins of the Evolution of Science. By Thony Christie.
- Astrology vs Astronomy: What’s the Difference?.
- manorama online astrology english.
- todays horoscope for aries?
- horoscope for 11 libra!
- horoscope today scorpio!
They are mostly made of hydrogen and helium and have no solid surfaces — in fact they may not have anything solid in them at all.
Recently, two planets have been discovered around the star Gliese that may be rocky worlds bigger than Earth. Such worlds are called super-Earths. Constellations are arbitrary patterns humans read into the stars we see in the sky. Most of the constellations used in astronomy are from the Middle East by way of Greece and Rome.
Other cultures of course, have different constellations. The Sun, Moon and planets travel through a specific band in the sky called the Zodiac.
Astrology and astronomy
The classical zodiac has twelve constellations. With twelve constellations, the Sun is in a different one each month. There are 88 constellations and actually thirteen of them are on the ecliptic. The 13 th one is Ophiuchus. So how many constellations are on the Zodiac? Depends on what sky object you care about.
The Sun has thirteen along its path, the Moon has about twenty. If this seems quite arbitrary, it is. Planets do shine from reflected sunlight. The Sun is a star too, so it does the same thing. When you look up at the stars, remember that each one you see is a giant nuclear fusion reactor.
Some, maybe most of them have planets — planets that shine with borrowed light. Some names stick even when they make no sense. Lunar phases have two points named quarters: First Quarter and Last or Third Quarter. Each month has about four weeks because they are stand-ins for the phases of the moon.
There are four quarters in the total lunar cycle, so each week represents one quarter of the cycle. In order, they are:. People studied the motions of the planets and hoped to used them to predict not only the behavior of the heavens, but also wars, natural disasters, the rise and fall of kings, and other earthly matters. However, around the time of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, astronomers came to realize that astrology was basically bunk.
From that time on, the primary job of an astronomer was to use physics to understand what was going on in the sky. Some people stuck to astrology, though. Astrologers use computer programs that tell them the positions of the planets using the work of real scientists, incidentally , and they do not look through telescopes or learn about stars and planets and galaxies and so forth like astronomers do--except perhaps for fun.
Astrology has many of the trappings of real science, like math and complicated diagrams and a specialized vocabulary, but astrologers do not follow the scientific method.
Real scientists make careful measurements in well-controlled studies. Astrologers don't do experiments to prove their theories. Instead, they like to provide anecdotal evidence --stories people tell about how accurate they think astrology is.
Anecdotal evidence is not acceptable in a real science because it's too easy to leave out all the negative experiences people have, and people not very good at recalling and accurately reporting experiences.
Britt studies the rings of Saturn. What's the difference between astronomy and astrology? Don't refer to an astronomer as an astrologer! This answer was last updated on June 17, Similar Questions that might Interest You What's the difference between astronomy and astrophysics? Intermediate Do astronomers believe in astrology?
Do galaxies that are receding from us faster than the speed of light disappear from our observations? Intermediate Why are astronomers interested in gravitational waves?