50 Fun Facts About Leo

What animal does the sign Leo represent?

Leo is simply Latin for lion; the Greeks called it Leon.

Leo is which sign in the order of the zodiac?

It follows Cancer and precedes Virgo, at the height of the northern summer.

Which celestial body is the traditional ruler of Leo?

The Sun and Moon each rule one sign; the Moon takes Cancer, the sign just before Leo.

Leo belongs to which classical element?

The other fire signs are Aries and Sagittarius.

What is Leo's modality in astrology?

Fixed signs fall in the middle of a season; Leo is the fixed sign of summer.

Which sign sits opposite Leo on the zodiac wheel?

Both are fixed signs; the water-bearer and the lion face each other across the chart.

Leo spans which degrees of celestial longitude?

Each sign gets exactly 30 degrees, counted from the spring equinox point in Aries.

In tropical astrology the Sun is in Leo from about July 23 to which date?

The Sun only reaches the actual constellation Leo around August 10, and stays until mid-September.

Astronomically, when does the Sun really pass through the constellation Leo (as of 2002)?

Precession has shifted the constellations roughly one sign away from the tropical dates over two millennia.

Which two constellations flank Leo in the zodiac?

The crab is to its west and the maiden to its east.

What is the name of the asterism of six stars that forms the lion's head, resembling a backwards question mark?

Regulus is the dot at the bottom of the question mark.

Which is the brightest star in Leo?

It is a four-star system about 79 light-years away, spinning so fast it is squashed into an oblate shape.

What does the Latin name of Leo's brightest star, Alpha Leonis, mean?

Copernicus is credited with the name; the Babylonians already called it the King Star.

Alpha Leonis lies unusually close to the ecliptic, so it is regularly hidden by which body?

It sits under half a degree from the ecliptic, closer than any other bright star, and gets occulted in spates every 9.3 years.

Which planet last occulted Alpha Leonis, in 1959, and will do so again in 2044?

No other planet will pass in front of the star for millennia because of where their orbital nodes lie.

Roughly how far away is Alpha Leonis?

Its light left it around the time the Second World War was ending, give or take a few years.

Which star marks the lion's tail, its Arabic-derived name meaning exactly that?

Deneb in Cygnus has the same root: it is the swan's tail.

How far from the Sun is Beta Leonis, the lion's tail star?

It is a hot A-type star with about 15 times the Sun's luminosity.

Which faint red dwarf in Leo is one of the closest stars to the Sun?

Star Trek fans know it as the site of a disastrous battle with the Borg.

In which fictional universe is Wolf 359 the site of a famous battle?

Starfleet lost 39 ships to a single Borg cube there in The Next Generation.

What kind of object is Wolf 359, prone to sudden bursts of brightness?

Its surface magnetic field is hundreds of times stronger than the Sun's.

R Leonis, a red giant in Leo, is which type of pulsating star?

It swings between magnitude 10 and about 6 over roughly 310 days, sometimes brightening to naked-eye visibility.

Caffau's star in Leo is remarkable for having the lowest known level of what?

At about 13 billion years old it is one of the oldest stars in the Galaxy, formed before heavier elements were common.

The Leo Triplet is a group of what?

M65, M66 and NGC 3628 are gravitationally tugging stars off one another about 37 million light-years away.

The Leo Ring, a vast intergalactic cloud in the constellation, is made of what?

It is a primordial gas cloud that has somehow never collapsed into stars.

NGC 2903, a barred spiral in Leo found by Herschel in 1784, is often compared to which galaxy?

It is similar in size and shape to our own galaxy and lies about 25 million light-years away.

The Huge-LQG, found in Leo, is what kind of structure?

It is the second-largest structure known in the observable universe.

Which group of stars was cut away from the tuft of the lion's tail to form a separate constellation?

Tycho Brahe formalised the split in 1602, though the Greeks and Romans had already called it Berenice's Hair.

The Leonid meteor shower is associated with which comet?

Because the comet orbits backwards relative to Earth, Leonids hit the atmosphere at 70 km/s, the fastest of any annual shower.

Roughly how often do the Leonids produce a full meteor storm?

Storm years can exceed 1,000 meteors an hour; 1966 topped 40 per second.

The Leonid storm of which year is credited with launching the modern scientific study of meteors?

Denison Olmsted worked out that the meteors radiated from Leo and came from a cloud of particles in space, not the weather.

The great 1833 Leonid storm inspired which jazz standard?

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian also opens with its hero born under the same shower.

On roughly what date do the Leonids peak?

Outside storm years the shower is modest, at around 10 to 15 meteors an hour.

In Greek myth, Leo represents the beast Heracles killed as which of his labours?

His cousin King Eurystheus set the task; the hydra came next.

Why could the Nemean lion not be killed with ordinary weapons?

Heracles' first arrow simply bounced off its thigh.

How did Heracles finally kill the Nemean lion?

He first blocked one of the two entrances to its cave so it could not escape.

What did Athena tell Heracles to use to skin the lion when his knife failed?

He wore the pelt ever after, and it became his trademark in art.

Terrified when Heracles returned with the lion, King Eurystheus had what made to hide in?

He then refused to let Heracles into the city and sent orders through a herald nicknamed the Dung-man.

According to Hesiod, which goddess raised the Nemean lion and sent it to terrorise Nemea?

Another tradition says the moon goddess Selene threw the lion down from the Moon at Hera's request.

Which conqueror is shown wearing a lion's pelt on his head, Heracles-style, on his famous sarcophagus?

Alexander's family claimed descent from Heracles, so the costume was a political statement.

What did the Babylonians call the constellation Leo?

UR.GU.LA in their catalogue; the bright star at its breast was the King Star.

Some mythologists think that in Sumeria, Leo represented which monster slain by Gilgamesh?

Humbaba was the guardian of the Cedar Forest, killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

The Egyptians worshipped the constellation because it appeared during which annual event?

They called it Knem, and the flood promised full granaries for the year ahead.

Which pharaoh's gold throne features lion heads and clawed feet, symbols of royal power linked to Leo?

The throne was found in his tomb by Howard Carter in 1922.

The Roman poet Ovid gave Leo which epithet?

He also called it Violentus Leo, the violent lion; others tied it to Bacchus.

Which Roman god was so consistently identified with the lion that Leo was called Bacchi Sidus, his star?

Manilius disagreed and called it the Star of Jupiter and Juno.

Gliese 436, a faint star in Leo, is orbited by a transiting planet comparable in mass to which planet?

Gliese 436 b is a 'hot Neptune' whose atmosphere is being blown away into a comet-like tail.

Leo belongs to which polarity group of signs?

The positive signs are the fire and air triplicities, all odd-numbered.

Which Danish astronomer, in 1602, cut the 'tuft' of Leo's tail away to help form Coma Berenices?

There was precedent for the separate grouping among the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The carbon star CW Leo is the brightest star in the night sky in which part of the spectrum?

Also catalogued as IRC +10216, it outshines everything else at 10 micrometres.