Ophiuchus symbol (⛎)

Asclepius among the stars

In the story as Ian Ridpath retells it, Asclepius was raised by the centaur Chiron and learned medicine so well that he could raise the dead. In Crete he saw one snake bring a herb to another that had been killed and revive it, and with the same herb he brought back Glaucus, the drowned son of King Minos. Hyginus, Ridpath says, gives this as the reason Ophiuchus holds a snake, which became the symbol of healing because snakes shed their skin and seem to be reborn. Hades complained that the flow of the dead was drying up, Zeus killed Asclepius with a thunderbolt, and then, to calm Apollo, made him immortal and set him among the stars. In the version Allen gives, Pluto persuades Jove, after Asclepius tries to revive the dead Orion.

Is Ophiuchus the 13th zodiac sign?

Not in astrology. The Sun passes through the constellation, but astrology’s signs are not constellations. Britannica says the Babylonians divided the zodiac into 12 signs about 500 BCE, each a twelfth, or 30°, of the circle. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, in the 2nd century AD, counts the signs from the spring equinox, taking the sign that begins there, Aries, as the starting point of them all. NASA’s explainer for children puts the number down to the calendar: the Babylonians already had a 12-month calendar, so each month got one equal slice of the zodiac, and they left Ophiuchus out, though by their own stories, NASA says, there were 13 constellations. The constellations themselves are uneven. NASA gives the Sun 45 days lined up with Virgo, 7 with Scorpius and about 18 with Ophiuchus.

Astrologers make the same distinction from their side. The Western zodiac is tropical, measured from the Sun’s place at the spring equinox; Hindu astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, measured against the stars, as Robert Lebling explains in AramcoWorld. When a “13th sign” went round the internet in January 2011, Linda Zlotnick, an astrologer in St. Paul, Minnesota, told the Associated Press that the tropical zodiac, the one most commonly used, isn’t affected, and that the less widely used sidereal zodiac is the one based on the constellations. “This doesn’t change your chart at all,” Shelley Ackerman of the American Federation of Astrologers told the AP. Britannica adds that astrology is not supported by science.

Did NASA change the zodiac?

No. NASA’s Space Place site for children published “Constellations and the Calendar” in January 2016, explaining that the Sun lines up with 13 constellations in a year. In September 2016, Lebling writes, Cosmopolitan UK wrongly reported that NASA had updated the zodiac, moving the dates of the signs and adding Ophiuchus. NASA answered on its Tumblr on 20 September: “We didn’t change any zodiac signs, we just did the math.” The same post calls astrology the belief that the positions of stars and planets can influence human events, and says it is not considered a science.

The story had run before. In January 2011 Parke Kunkle, an astronomy instructor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, explained precession to the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. M. Alex Johnson of NBC News traced how the interview became a “new zodiac” on Twitter. “Astronomers have known about this since about 130 B.C.,” Kunkle told the AP.

The ⛎ emoji

⛎ is an emoji as well as a symbol. Unicode’s emoji data puts it in the zodiac group after the twelve signs, with the label E0.6, which marks emoji added in Unicode 6.0, the 2010 release that took in the emoji of the Japanese mobile phone carriers. Unicode’s mapping tables, made for that release, match ⛎ to symbols in the KDDI and SoftBank sets, though not in DoCoMo’s.