We tested astrology against 4,296 famous lives

Where the idea came from

AsterNym has a chart for every one of the 9,839 public figures on our famous birthdays pages. Most of those people also have a public record: awards with a year attached, the year a career began, a date of death. That's a record of what happened, sitting next to a chart that astrologers say should have anticipated it.

So we asked the plain question. When something big happened in one of these lives, was the matching astrological signal present more often than chance?

The events come from Wikidata, harvested between 2 and 4 October 2026: 9,329 dated awards, 2,856 career starts and 1,227 deaths across 4,296 people. Birth dates come from our own roster. For the second study, birth times come from records rated AA or A on the Rodden scale, meaning a birth certificate or the person's own statement.

The rules, written first

The easiest way to make astrology look right is to test it after you've seen the answer. You try Jupiter, then Saturn, then a wider orb, then a different house system, and keep whichever one fits. With enough tries something always fits.

So before running anything we wrote down every claim, every orb, every window and the pass mark, and committed that document to our code history with a timestamp. Two gaps turned up while writing the code. We settled both in a dated amendment before the first run. Nothing changed after we saw results.

Each claim is the commonest version of what astrologers say about that kind of event. Jupiter for honours. Saturn for vocation and endings. Personal Year 1 for beginnings and 9 for endings in numerology. A clash between branches, or a new ten-year luck pillar, in BaZi.

Before reading any outcome we checked the code against rates we could work out by hand. Personal Year 1 should come up in one year in nine; the code said 0.112. A luck pillar starting within a year either side should cover three years in ten; it said 0.301. All of them matched, so the comparisons below are counting the right things.

Study one: the Sun, 4,296 people

Most people on our roster have no recorded birth time, so the first study used only what a birth date gives you: the Sun, numerology and the year pillar. A ratio of 1.00 means the signal showed up exactly as often as chance. The range is where the true figure probably lies.

The award tests had the most data and the flattest results. Jupiter was conjunct or trine the Sun in 3,983 award years against 3,997 expected. With over nine thousand awards, an effect of even 5% would have shown.

We excluded 37 awards and 475 career starts that happened before age 15, most of them child performers, and 125 awards given after death. The rules said so in advance.

Study two: exact birth times, 551 people

The usual reply to a Sun-only test is that the Sun is the crudest part of a chart. Astrologers put more weight on the angles, the houses and the Moon, all of which need a birth time. So after study one we wrote seven new claims for the people whose birth time is documented, locked them, and ran them.

Luck pillars depend on sex as well as birth time, so those two claims ran only on people whose sex is recorded as male or female. That cost 97 career starts and 7 deaths.

The one that came close

Jupiter over the Midheaven, the top of the chart, is the textbook sign of public honour. In award years it showed up 232 times against 204 expected: 14% more often, with a range that just touches 1. The 10th-house version came out almost the same, which is no surprise, since it's the same planet aimed at the same part of the chart. That's one near-miss, not two.

It didn't clear the bar. But a 14% lift is the kind of result people quote, so we ran one more check, labelled as exploratory because we thought of it afterwards. Same 1,407 awards, same code, Jupiter crossing other points in the same charts.

The other six points drift between 0.87 and 1.06 on this sample. So random noise here is about 13% either way, and the Midheaven result is the same size as that noise. The IC sits exactly opposite the Midheaven, so its Jupiter years fall about six years apart from the Midheaven's, and the two mirror each other: one high, one low. That's what chance looks like when you slice the same 1,407 events seven ways.

I don't think the Midheaven result means anything, and I'd say so even if it had scraped past the bar.

The fair way to settle it is a fresh test: write down this one claim alone and check it against people whose birth times we haven't used yet.

What this rules out, and what it doesn't

The award and career tests had enough data to spot a lift of 10% to 30%. None appeared. If Jupiter really made honours more likely, these are the samples where you'd expect to see it.

The death tests in study two are small: 129 deaths, with six to twelve hits each. They could only have caught a doubling. They rule that out and nothing finer.

Wikidata dates most awards to a year, not a day. A slow planet like Jupiter gets credit for a whole year either way, so coarse dates make every signal easier to hit. The comparison years share the same coarseness, so it doesn't favour either side, but it does blur the picture.

Each test checks one signal. A working astrologer reads many factors together, and these results don't test that practice. They test the specific claims that appear in horoscope columns and textbooks: Jupiter brings recognition, Saturn brings endings, Personal Year 9 closes a chapter. On sixteen of those, the documented lives of four thousand people showed no trace.

Why we still draw the charts

The positions on every chart we draw are real: where Jupiter was, which branch ruled the year, what your Life Path adds up to. That arithmetic is checkable and we check it. What this study tested is the next step, the claim that those positions tell you when things will happen to you.

We publish a list of things we won't tell you, including when you'll marry, fall ill or die. This study is part of the reason that list exists. Read your chart as a vocabulary for thinking about yourself, if it helps. Don't plan around its timing.

If you'd rather check the claim on yourself, the natal chart shows the same Jupiter and Saturn positions we used here. Line them up against the years that mattered to you and see what you find.