Is astrology backed by science?

The answer, in short, is no. There is no scientific backing to the conclusions drawn by astrology. But there are many ways that astrology is connected with the human world, as it’s intertwined with the pursuit of knowledge about our place in the cosmos.

The Sun shapes the structure of the day and the seasons, the Moon influences the ocean’s tides, eclipses turn the sky dark, and solar storms create displays of green and purple lights on the Earth’s celestial canvas. Given these observable effects, it makes sense that people throughout history have wondered if the planets’ positions could also influence human life on Earth –. whether the alignment of planets and stars affects who we are as people or what happens to us over the course of our lives. But, as Paul Byrne, an associate professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Washington University, explains, “there’s just no way the motion of planets through the cosmos can affect us”. There would be too many effects to take into account on principal if they were.²

“The only way I can think of another planet having any kind of impact on us,” he adds, “is if one were to stroll around at night looking up at Mars, say, or Jupiter or Venus – and by not looking where they’re going, walk into a lamppost.”

Scientists have also long been using the scientific method to try to corroborate conclusions drawn by astrology to no avail. In the 1980s, American physicist Shawn Carlson  conducted a study to test the validity of astrology. He tasked 30 astrologers with looking at astrological birth charts – which map the Sun, Moon, and planets at the time of a person’s birth – of 116 people and seeing if they could match each person’s birth chart to their correct personality profile. The astrologers, who had never met the participants, were given three personality profiles to choose from for each birth chart. The test was “double-blind”, meaning that neither the testers nor the astrologers knew the answers to any of the questions. His results, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, showed that the astrologers only got a third of the pairings right, which is not statistically better than if they had chosen completely randomly.³

A test similar to Carlson was recreated more recently in August 2024, where 152 astrologers were asked to match twelve people’s birth charts to questionnaires they’d answered about their personality and life.⁴ Once again, the astrologers got less than a third of the matches right and even agreed on their matches among themselves less than a third of the time too. No more than chance.

Another scientific study sought to match the personality and intelligence test results of 15,000 people with their date of birth and found no correlation.⁵