Have you ever looked up into the night sky and thought “I want to study those in the future”? But you think “would that make me an astronomer or an astrologer ‘’”. But what’s the difference? I was wondering the same thing, so I researched it and decided that I should probably write about it.
When I say astrology, what comes to mind? It might be some boring thing that you probably learned about in science, or maybe you thought of zodiac signs. Zodiac signs might be a part of astrology but they aren’t the entire thing. It’s a very old concept created before the modern understanding of how space works and what it is. Many people think astrology is completely fake because there is no scientific evidence and (not trying to offend anyone) they’d be right.
Astronomy is a science that deals with really anything space-related. It focuses on anything that is outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Whether that be the Moon, Mars, or Gliese 667Cc which is 22.18 light years away. Astronomers are mainly concerned with the classification and description of an event or celestial body. While astrophysics tries to actually explain what’s happening, so there is a difference between them.
Astronomy isn’t a new science at all. It originated from around 1000 BCE with the Mesopotamians when they started to track the movement of stars in the night sky. Without astronomy we would see the moon and just think of it as a rock. But with astronomy, we’d know it’s a spherical rocky body, probably with a small metallic core, revolving around Earth in a slightly eccentric orbit at a mean distance of about 384,000 km (238,600 miles)(got this from Britannica).
So in short, astrology is mainly just a belief based on the stars and planets in the sky. On the other end, astronomy is the study of celestial bodies outside of Earth’s atmosphere. That includes the moon, asteroids, comets, meteors, planets, ect. There are people who still strongly believe in astrology and there are people who think it’s kinda dumb and doesn’t make sense. If you want to hear a professional on this, listen to Neil Degrasse Tyson in this video disprove astrology.
