Astrophysicist Debunks Horoscopes with Basic Astronomy (+ SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!)

it's my birthday today today when I'm filming but it is my birthday when this video comes out so I wanted to do two special things for my birthday the first off is to make a very special announcement I have written a book I am so excited to tell you all this I read a book with Orion publishing it is called space the 10 things that you should know and it's got 10 short chapters on everything from you know how we know Dark Matter exists to why the night sky is dark to where the next earth-like planet is unlike what was before the Big Bang you can tell that I am incredibly excited about this because I thought I would never write a book I'm much good at the talking rather than the writing and putting words into sentences thing without in September so there'll be more details to pull up soon on where you can buy it but until then hang tight and I hope you're as excited as I am to see it on the shelves so next off my birthday I wanted to have a little bit of fun and I figured why not look at my horoscope and you know see what my outlook is for my birthday so I'm sure most of you will come across a horoscope before basically say for all the people born at this specific time of the year here is our prediction based on the movements of planets and stars in the sky of what your financial and love life outlook will be for this month there pedalled in most major magazines and also some newspapers as well for example here is my horoscope for Taurus for May 2019 from Elle magazine the previous couple months have felt chaotic for many torian's as you've been adapting to a once every 84 year visit from radical change maker Uranus the side spinning planet is visiting your sign from March 2019 until April 2026 revolutionising your entire life and identity bet you're feeling it bull you know what else is bull this horoscope so to me an astrophysicists the idea that a planet in the solar system can affect my identity and entire life is a little bit ridiculous for example here's another one for cosmopolitan it says just before dawn Venus cruises into Tauruses sky what makes this extra special is that Taurus is governed by Venus meaning it is a cosmic homecoming for this romantic planet Taurus is governed by Venus let's just break that down shall we so Taurus is considered my star sign because when I was born middle of May the Sun was supposedly in the constellation of Taurus on the sky so if you could have seen the stars behind the Sun in the day that I was born you would have seen the stars of tourists behind it on our sky in the sort of 2d projection of the 3d universe when you flatten everything down it looks like those stars all are very close to each other an ancient astronomers probably Greek astronomers decided way about when that those stars looked a little bit like the horns of a bull but the thing is that's just something humans decided and that was Western humans as well you can look at this part of the sky for other different star wars and other different cultures as well so you can look at it for Chinese you can look at it for Maori you can look at it for a bridge way and it's completely different stars and completely different configurations in that part of the sky as well and that's because they're all inventions of humanity the stars actually have nothing to do with each other in three dimensions those stars that look close by in Taurus there are actually thousands of light-years away but then they've also made the claim that Venus governs all of those stars in tourists they have nothing to do with each other the only star that Venus cares about is the Sun because it's just orbiting around it and that's all it will continue to do for the next couple of millennia and has also done since the formation of the solar system four billion years ago the closest star in Taurus to Venus is gillece 176 which is 31 light years away and the most distant is called 103 tau and that's 3228 light-years away so Venus would have to have been communicating with the stars in Taurus 6500 years ago about my love life for may 2019 back when the first horse was being domesticated in Macedonia 6500 years ago but you're sure Venus saw it back then so all horses this month could have success on tinder I am sure here's another one from that el horoscope from this month as well with the amorous planet in your dreamy 12th house you may have stars in your eyes but today's reality checking square from solemn Saturn rips off those rose-colored aviators and forces you to deal with the human being who's right in front of you right who decided Saturn was a solemn planet because it definitely wasn't Greek or Roman mythology because Saturn was the god of like wealth and prosperity and agriculture in time I think as well and also Saturday Saturday's on a solemn day either inside his named after Saturn so it can't be that the planet itself like what makes Saturn the planet solemn is it it's really cool atmosphere of hydrogen is it it's hexagon pull a storm is it the fact that it has a moon that looks like a Death Star so I started looking into Saturn more and why astrologers might consider that Saturn is stolen so I found this article at MSN of all places like you're better than this MSN which says that Saturn apparently represents things that are feared delays limitations hardships obstacles it represents time slowing down and heavy weighty feelings they also apparently holds wisdom and gifts under its rough appearance which I don't understand because Saturn has like the smoothest appearance of all planets in the solar system because it's basically a giant ball of spinning gas so you can't get much smoother than that I guess it's kind of oblique which basically means that like it's not a perfect sphere it's squashed because it's spinning so you don't like that feeling when you're on a merry-go-round and you're spinning and it feels like you're gonna fly off backwards well all of the gas on Saturn also kind of feels that force because Saturn is spinning so it bulges a bit its equator but I doesn't give it a rough appearance that just makes it look really cool in my book so I dug some more into the astrological literature and much like horoscopes that it is very is a very contradictory place the astrological literature there's no agreement whatsoever I found a lot of instances of like you know ancient astrologers believed blah but modern astrologers believed this instead because they prefer to which is like the exact opposite of how like science and astronomy works because if you do experiments they have to be repeatable and falsifiable and this is the exact opposite of that it's just people deciding that that's what they want to believe now because they can so this article I found on MSN also talks about how Saturn is going into what they call retrograde when it's retrograde on April 30th and comes out mid-september this year as well and apparently that's very bad now reg brain is a word that we use in astronomy as well it essentially means the planet looks like it's moving backwards on the sky not a big deal to astronomers are all just kind of cool thing to notice but just because the planets appear to going backwards on the sky doesn't mean they're actually going backwards in reality they're still going to be orbiting around the Sun just at a slightly slower speed than we are on earth closer in towards the Sun so what happens is when Saturn appears to be going retrograde is that it's been happily orbiting up here and then earth all of a sudden has been sort of orbiting behind it seeing it move forward in the sky but then almost on earth overtakes Saturn in its orbit and so you appear from Earth to see Saturn going backwards the same way that if you overtake another car at a faster speed on a motorway for a while as a stationary passenger when you look out the window it looks like the other car is actually going backwards when in essence it's not it's still going forwards clearly so it's not anything to do with the planet itself it's not anything to do with us humans on earth it's all just to do with perspective but from what I can tell in astrology retrograde is bad at least for the outer planets like Saturn and Jupiter I think the inner planets also do retrograde but a lot more often because they orbit a lot of faster speed than Earth and so astrologers have just decided oh because that happens so often that's not relevant but the outer planets that don't go into retrograde very often that's bad and as far as I can tell it's bad because that means change and something different is happening I don't always think that change is a bad thing but you know I'm not making up the rules here are stralla Jers are making up the rules so this brings me to my next point that horoscopes are just not consistent with each other at all it's almost as if they really are just making up the rules as they go so I found in all of the may 20 19 horoscopes for tourists I could mind that they all mentioned the new moon that happened on May 4th so according to cosmopolitan this lunation triggers an emotional awakening and now both you and the flowers are in bloom according to the Daily Telegraph Australia while the energy of the new moon in your sign makes it unlikely that you have a peaceful weekend ahead the New York Post says that with a new moon approaching you stand an excellent chance of success whatever it is you choose to do and then Elle magazine again says that the only Taurus New Moon of 2019 marks your personal New Year a cosmic coming-out day that puts you in touch with your truth this new moon launches you on a six-month voyage of self-discovery and autonomy so 10 days ago along with all the other people born from April 24th to May 20th I was gonna have an emotional truthful not peaceful yet successful coming-out weekend and I should now be honest journey of self-discovery I think I missed the boat on that one now there are some people that I know that read these because they like it as a work of fiction they like to read it because it's something fun to do they know that it's not right and then it has no scientific backing at all because the movements and the planets are nothing to do with humans on earth and that's because they know the difference between astronomy and actual science and study of the sky and astrophysics and astrology which is just a work of fiction the problem is when someone doesn't have that knowledge to make that informed decision because it is both damaging first of all to science because people don't know the difference between astronomy and actual science where you take evidence-based facts and research and use them to build a theory so that you can say hey I know dark matter exists because of all of this evidence I have compared to astrology which is just you know people making up the rules as they go saying yeah venus leads taurus so it might seem harmless to publish these sort of mini works of fiction in lots of different publications but really it's so damaging not just to science and people themselves it does need to stop especially when you think that a lot of these services are paid for services as well so not only could be giving financial advice but also taking money off vulnerable people as well and I think we should petition for major publications that still publish these horoscopes at daily weekly or monthly to either remove them or even to put a disclaimer at the top of the page that says that they are entirely a work of fiction but the other hilarious thing about astrology and horoscopes and all of these works published is that they are reliant on the fact that you know a person is a specific star sign I am a Taurus because I was born on May 15th however 86% of people around the world actually born under a different star sign than what they think so the dates of star signs of a tourist April 20th to May 21st is the date that was set 2,000 years ago by Greek astronomers that said those are the dates in which the Sun is part of that constellation in the sky so the Sun tracks out across what we call the ecliptic in the sky because that's where we always see it from Earth and so there are actually not 12 but 13 constellations that the Sun passes through and there's another one called off yuccas that ancient astronomers basically just ignored and it's not because the sun's barely in it it's actually in it for 19 days which is longer than the Suns in Scorpius for in fact as well so that will shift some of the star signs around adding an extra one adding a thirteenth star sign that you could be but also the fact that the earth hasn't kept the same perspective this entire time either is doing what we call processing this precession comes from the fact the Earth's axis is tilted so here's the Sun and then here's the plane that the earth is orbiting around the Sun in it doesn't spin on its axis perpendicular to that it has a slight tilt about 23 degrees and it's what causes our seasons because it causes the Northern Hemisphere's point towards the Sun for six months and then away from the Sun for six months and then switch with the southern hemisphere now you think about setting something like a spinning top going an angle that is not going to stay at that same angle you set it off going at is actually going to rotate in a circle before it comes back to the position that you started at it takes the earth 26,000 years to get back to that sort of starting position we've had 2,000 years since the Greek astronomers first set those dates of the star signs that's about a 13 of the Earth's precession time so not only have you added an extra constellation but you've also shifted things by a 13th as well basically by almost a month and so in reality all of the star sign dates are shifted so in fact to be born under tourists in the past hundred years or so you actually have to have been born between May 15th and June 22nd so I'll put a link in the box below for you to work out what star sign you actually are ie what constellation the Sun was in front of on the day you were born if that mid does still mean anything to you but for me is just yet another reason why basing a life financial or perhaps even fashion choices on your star sign is a complete and utter load of both so because of that we're having a period of destruction and transformation thanks to Pluto followed by a time of maturation ending stabilization and hard work all because of Sam nobody pick on Pluto Pluto has been through enough guys just absolutely dross isn't it huge and if I just like came on here once a month and was like all of the conjunction of Mars and the moon soon everybody born in November is gonna get some bunnies you

Channel: Dr. Becky

Views: 65,878

Rating: 4.8667893 out of 5

Keywords: astronomy, astrophysics, space, saturn, mars, venus, taurus, constellation, star signs, zodiac, precession, earth axis, astrology, horoscopes, debunk, ecliptic, womeninSTEM, womeninspace, womeninscience, science, dr becky, dr becky smethurst, rebecca smethurst, becky smethurst

Id: JAiW9lx4U58

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019