This is something I wrote almost 5 years ago. But I am re-posting it as a kind of lead in to something I’ve been working on the past few weeks, about astrology and its poor reputation. I had been trying to see clearly how binary stars move: “Lonely” Pluto’s been in the news lately due to the fly-by of the U.S. New Horizons probe. Startling images and geological questions have arisen, and two new moons have been photographed. But what piqued my interest was the pronounced wobble in Pluto’s motion, not a new discovery, which has to do with both the proximity and similarity in mass of it’s largest moon Charon. This led to a general investigation into how and why celestial bodies are influenced by each other in space, according to conventional physics.
