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Move over Mercury: What is Chiron, and what does it mean to be in retrograde?
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Move over Mercury: What is Chiron, and what does it mean to be in retrograde?

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You may have seen an interesting sense in your social media feeds recently: “Chiron is in retrograde.” If you look like me, you’ve never heard of Chiron – and I am a professional astronomer.
So what is Chiron, and what does it mean to be in retrograde? The short answer is that Chiron is an asteroid-slash comet around Jupiter and Saturn around Jupiter. And until January 2026 it will look like it is going backwards in the air. If you can see it.

But there is more to the story.

What is Chiron?

The official name of Chiron is (2060) Chiron. First things first: it is pronounced as “kai-ruhn”, with a hard K sound.
It was discovered by astronomer Charles Kowal in 1977. This was long after the system of Western astrology was developed, which probably explains why people who check their daily horoscopes are also blissfully unconsciously of its existence.

It was initially classified as an asteroid or a rock in the room. In 1989, astronomers discovered that Chiron sometimes has a tail or “coma”, who tells us that it is actually a comet or a “dirty snowball”. Since then, Chiron has been classified and both an asteroid and a comet.

A Hubble Space Telescope image from Chiron shows his fuzzy coma. Source: The conversation / Hubble Space Telescope

In 2023, more than 45 years after it was first discovered, astronomers confirmed that Chiron has rings. This makes it the fourth non-planet in the solar system to have rings. (The Planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have rings, just like the asteroid Chariklo and the Dwarf Planets Haumea and Quaoar.)

Chiron runs the sun in an oval -shaped track. The closest to the sun comes about 1.3 billion kilometers (about eight times the distance between the earth and the sun) and the fur from the sun is no less than 2.7 billion km (about 19 times the distance between the earth and the sun).

This places it between the jobs of Jupiter and Uranus, which cuts through the orbit of Saturn.

Centaurs in the room

Chiron is a member of the Centaurs. This is a group of small bodies for solar systems that revolve the sun around Jupiter and Neptune. Their jobs are very unstable: they change over time due to gravity interactions with the gigantic planets.
In Greek mythology there were centers with the lower body and legs of a horse and the hull and arms of a human. Chiron was the oldest Centaur, the son of the Titan Kronos. He was considered the wisest centaur.

Fans of Percy Jackson and the Olympians can also recognize Chiron as director of Camp Halfblood.

A black background with several colorful circles and ovals that demonstrate the tracks of planets and small solar systems in jobs outside the track of Jupiter. The many overlapping circles show how many objects there are in a set of D

The jobs of different centers, including Chiron. Source: The conversation / Nick Anthony Fiorenza

Chiron in Retrograde

In astronomy, retrograde movement is when something deteriorates compared to everything else.
Apparent retrograde movement is where an object in the air, such as a planet, to appear To go back when we look at it from the earth. The object has not actually changed direction; It just looks like from our perspective.
All planets (and Chiron) run the sun in the same direction. This means that the planets usually look like they are moving over the air in the western east. But when the Earth “catches” into a planet (or a planet catches on the earth) and catches it up, the planet seems to be temporarily moving in the air in a west to the air.
This temporary illusion is clear retrograde movement. It is just like when you drive in a car and catch up a slower car, that slower car looks like it is going backwards while catching it up.
Chiron went to retrograde on July 30, 2025 (that is, clear retrograde movement) and will be normal again on January 2, 2026. But unless you have a telescope or have some long exposure photography, you would never know what way Chiron travels. Chiron is very weak, so you can’t see it with your eyes.

The old astrologers did not know about Chiron, but I would like to appreciate a centaur in space with a ring on it.

The conversation

Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Radio Astronomy, University of Sydney

#Move #Mercury #Chiron #retrograde

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