56 Fun Facts About Aries

The name Aries is the word for 'ram' in which language?

Latin: the Romans translated the Greek sky figures into their own tongue and their names stuck, so the sign still goes by what was simply their everyday word for a ram.

Which of these days always falls during Aries season?

April Fools' Day always lands inside the sign, which runs until about April 19. One much-debated theory says the first April fools were people still keeping New Year in spring.

In tropical astrology, the Sun enters Aries at which astronomical moment?

The March equinox, when day and night level out, also opened the year in several ancient calendars, and astrologers still count the zodiac from that moment.

Aries belongs to which of the four astrological elements?

Fire, which astrologers read as heat, drive and restless energy; it is where the sign gets its reputation as the zodiac's impatient self-starter.

Which two other signs share Aries's element?

Leo and Sagittarius. The four elements repeat in a fixed order around the zodiac, so signs that share one always sit four places apart.

Which planet rules Aries in astrology?

Mars. Named for the Roman god of war, the planet lends the sign its combative streak: astrologers cast Aries as quick to act and quick to anger.

Which sign sits directly opposite Aries in the zodiac?

Libra sits six signs on, directly across the wheel. Greek astronomers saw its stars as the claws of the scorpion next door; the scales caught on under the Romans.

Aries is one of the four signs of which 'modality'?

Cardinal comes from a Roman word for a hinge: astrologers cast these four signs as the zodiac's initiators, the ones that want action and set things moving.

What colour is traditionally assigned to Aries?

Red. Astrologers match the colour to the sign's temperament, which the old handbooks class as choleric: bold, impatient and quick to anger.

Which Thai festival marks the Sun entering the Hindu zodiac's Aries?

Songkran. The Sun's mid-April passage into Mesha, the Hindu zodiac's name for Aries, opens the traditional Thai New Year, which people welcome by pouring water for cleansing and good fortune.

Which festival opens Iran's calendar year at the moment the Sun enters Aries?

Nowruz, the Persian New Year, opens the month of Farvardin at an exact astronomical instant, so families gather round the haft-sin table and count down to whatever hour it falls.

Which band of Greek heroes sailed to fetch the golden fleece of the ram that became Aries?

The Argonauts took their name from their ship, the Argo, which won a place in the sky too: a constellation so sprawling that astronomers later broke it into three.

Who plotted to kill Phrixus before the golden ram rescued him?

His stepmother, Ino, in the usual telling: she resented her husband's children by his first wife, and her plot so nearly worked that the king had Phrixus at the altar when the ram arrived.

What did Ino use to trick King Athamas into agreeing to sacrifice his son Phrixus?

A faked oracle. Ino first spoiled the seed corn so the harvest failed, then bribed the king's messengers to say Delphi demanded the boy's death to end the famine.

The strait where Helle fell from the golden ram and drowned was named the Hellespont; what is it called today?

The Dardanelles. Herodotus says the Persian king Xerxes later had this same strait given 300 lashes after a storm wrecked the bridges he had built across it.

The golden ram carried Phrixus safely to which land?

Colchis lay at the far end of the Black Sea, in what is now Georgia; its king kept the ram's fleece, and the hero who later came for it had to cross that whole sea.

In later tellings, which sea god took a ram's shape to father the golden ram of the Aries myth?

Poseidon. In Hyginus's version he hid the maiden Theophane from her suitors by turning her into a ewe and himself into a ram, and their lamb was born with a golden fleece.

What did Phrixus do with the golden ram once it had carried him to safety?

Sacrificed it: in the usual telling Phrixus offered the ram to Zeus in thanks and gave its fleece to the local king, who nailed it to an oak.

The Golden Fleece hung on an oak in a grove sacred to which god, guarded by a never-sleeping dragon?

Ares. Despite the look-alike names, the sign's name is just an old word for a ram and has nothing to do with the war god's.

Which hero later stole the Golden Fleece from King Aeëtes, with the help of the king's daughter Medea?

Jason was owed a throne: the usurper Pelias promised to hand back the kingdom of Iolcus if he came home with the fleece.

The constellation Aries lies between which two zodiac constellations?

Pisces and Taurus flank it to west and east. The constellations keep the same order as the signs, so each spring the Sun slides out of the fishes, through the ram and on into the bull.

Stargazers find faint Aries by looking between the Great Square of Pegasus and which bright star cluster to its east?

The Pleiades. Aries needs the signposts: for the sign that leads the zodiac it is a dim one, with only a short crooked line of three stars that most people can pick out.

Which ancient stargazers listed the stars of Aries as 'the Hired Man' on their clay tablets?

The Babylonians. 'Hired Man' meant a farm labourer of the kind taken on at harvest; scholars still argue over when the ram took his place, or whether it was there all along.

Until Pluto was discovered, astrologers gave Aries and which other sign the same ruling planet?

Scorpio. The ancients had only seven 'planets' to share among twelve signs, so five of them ruled two apiece; Pluto's discovery gave astrologers a spare to hand the scorpion.

Classical writers linked the constellation Aries to which Egyptian god, often shown with a ram's horns?

Amun-Ra, king of the Egyptian gods. Greeks and Romans merged him with their own sky father, so old star books also call the constellation 'Jupiter Ammon'.

Old star maps show Aries as a crouching, wingless ram looking back towards what?

Taurus. Star atlases long drew the ram lying down and glancing back over its shoulder, as if astonished to see the bull rising backwards behind it.

Which 2nd-century astronomer listed Aries among his 48 constellations?

Ptolemy, working in Alexandria around AD 150, fixed the sky's cast of characters so firmly that mapmakers were still copying his figures more than a thousand years later.

The First Point of Aries is the zero mark for which sky coordinate, the stars' version of longitude?

Right ascension is counted eastward from that point in hours, not degrees: the sky turns through 24 of them a day, so a star's position can be read off a clock.

Despite its name, the First Point of Aries left Aries long ago; which constellation hosts it until around AD 2600?

Pisces. The point has slipped about 30 degrees west since Greek astronomers pinned it down over 2,000 years ago, yet everyone still calls it by its old address.

Who defined the First Point of Aries in 130 BC as a point south of Gamma Arietis?

Hipparchus also noticed the point would not stay put: his star positions disagreed with older Greek records, his first clue to the slow drift that has since carried it out of Aries.

Which slow wobble of Earth's axis means the Sun now reaches the stars of Aries only as it leaves the sign?

Precession: Earth's axis traces a slow circle roughly every 26,000 years, so the sign and the constellation of the same name have drifted about a month apart over the past two millennia.

The brightest star in Aries, Hamal, takes its name from the Arabic for what?

'Head of the ram' is the full phrase, rās al-ḥamal; on its own al-ḥamal, 'the lamb', was the Arabs' name for the whole constellation, which its brightest star inherited.

Hamal, the brightest star in Aries, is an ageing star cooler than the Sun; what type is it?

An orange giant: Hamal has burned through the hydrogen in its core and swollen to about 15 times the Sun's width, and its cooler surface glows orange.

Mesarthim in Aries was found to be a double star in 1664 by which scientific rival of Isaac Newton?

Robert Hooke, who spent years disputing Newton's claim to the inverse-square law of gravity, found one of the very first double stars here; a small telescope still splits the pair.

Which metal do astrologers assign to Aries through its ruling planet?

Iron. Alchemists paired each of the seven classical planets with one of the seven metals the ancients knew; copper, tin and lead belonged to three of the others.

Teegarden's Star in Aries is just 12 light-years away but invisible to the naked eye; what kind of star is it?

A red dwarf, so small and dim that one of the Sun's nearest neighbours went unnoticed until 2003, when it turned up in images taken years earlier to hunt asteroids.

The runaway star 53 Arietis was likely ejected from which star-forming region?

The Orion Nebula. 53 Arietis is one of three stars racing away from it in different directions, flung out when a companion exploded or when two pairs of stars collided.

A 1627 Christian star atlas gave each zodiac sign to an apostle; which one replaced Aries, the leading sign?

Saint Peter. Julius Schiller's atlas handed the leading sign to the 'prince of the apostles' and turned the small triangle of stars next door into his bishop's mitre.

Why do skywatchers rarely see June's strong Arietid meteor shower?

It arrives in daylight: each June the shower streams from a point in Aries only about 30 degrees from the Sun, so most of its meteors are lost in the glare.

Which observatory discovered the Arietid meteor shower in 1947?

Jodrell Bank began by accident: Bernard Lovell hauled army radar to a university botany field in Cheshire to look for cosmic rays, and found it was picking up meteors instead.

The obsolete constellation Apes, drawn in 1612 from four faint stars of Aries, showed which insect?

A bee. The Dutch mapmaker Petrus Plancius added it on a globe in 1612; later hands redrew it more than once, ending with a fly that astronomers duly swatted from the charts.

Which medieval English poem opens with sweet spring showers and the 'young sun' halfway through the Ram, as Aries was known?

The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer knew his sky: he wrote a manual on the astrolabe for his young son Lewis, and he dates the pilgrims' departure by the Sun's place in the zodiac.

Which planet is said to be in 'detriment' in Aries because it rules the opposite sign?

Venus. A planet is in detriment in the sign opposite its home, where astrologers think it works against its nature: the planet of harmony is ill at ease in the zodiac's most combative sign.

Which tarot card, whose throne is carved with rams in the classic Rider–Waite deck, is assigned to Aries?

The Emperor. Tarot's father figure is matched with the zodiac's take-charge sign, and the Rider–Waite deck shows his stone throne carved with four rams to make the link plain.

Which Aries poet stopped celebrating her birthday for years after Martin Luther King was killed on it?

Maya Angelou turned 40 the day King was shot in 1968. She went years without marking the date, sending flowers to his widow, Coretta Scott King, instead.

In astrology the Age of Aries ended about 2,000 years ago; which age do many astrologers say is dawning now?

Aquarius, though nobody agrees when: tidy schemes start it in AD 2000, while by the official star boundaries the Sun's marker point will not get there until about 2597.

The Aries, a fuel-efficient 'K-car' of the 1980s, helped rescue which American carmaker from the brink of collapse?

Chrysler. Lee Iacocca had convinced Washington to guarantee up to $1.5 billion in loans to keep it alive, and the Dodge Aries and its Plymouth twin sold well enough to help it repay them seven years early.

Astrologically, the constellation Aries was associated with which part of the body?

The head. The Roman poet Manilius ran the zodiac down the body in order, giving the ram, 'chieftain of them all', the head and the fishes the feet; medieval doctors timed their bloodletting by the same chart.

Which Damon Albarn band released the 2020 single 'Aries'?

Gorillaz. 'Aries', with New Order's Peter Hook on bass, was episode three of Song Machine, a web series that released the band's new collaborations one at a time through 2020.

Which Mexican singer won a Grammy for his 1993 album Aries, home of the hits 'Ayer' and 'Hasta Que Me Olvides'?

Luis Miguel followed Romance, his hit collection of old boleros, by swinging back to pop ballads and dance tracks, and the change of gear earned him his second Grammy.

In which classic science-fiction film does a spherical shuttle called Aries ferry passengers to the Moon?

2001: A Space Odyssey. Aboard the Aries, a stewardess in grip shoes walks calmly up the side of a circular walkway until she is upside down, a shot filmed on a rotating set.

Which body's official list of 88 constellations includes Aries?

The International Astronomical Union fixed the list in the 1920s and published official borders in 1930, turning Aries from a pattern of stars into a mapped region of sky.

In Apollodorus's telling, which god gave Nephele the golden ram that carried her children to safety?

Hermes. In Apollodorus the ram is his gift to the children's mother, the cloud nymph Nephele, who snatches her son from the altar and sets both children on its back.

What is the Ancient Greek name for the sign Aries?

Krios, plain Greek for a ram. Ancient writers even explained why its stars are so dim: the ram left its shining fleece behind on Earth before taking its place in the sky.

In the 1670s French astronomers redrew four faint stars of Aries as which emblem of their kings?

The fleur-de-lis. The lily lasted only a few years on the charts, but it left a trace: one of its stars, 39 Arietis, is still officially named Lilii Borea after it.

Which Aries actress, who played a Hogwarts student, shares her birthday with Leonardo da Vinci?

Emma Watson shares 15 April with Leonardo and with her co-star Emma Thompson, the films' Professor Trelawney; World Art Day is held on that date because it was his birthday.