Claws that became scales
The Greeks saw the Scorpion’s claws in these stars, the Chelai, a name Aratus uses.
Libra only became a constellation in its own right in Rome: the scales of Astraea, goddess of justice, whom Greek myth linked with Virgo.
The First Point of Libra
In Babylon, MUL Zibanu, ‘the scales’, was also called the Claws of the Scorpion; the scales were sacred to Shamash, the sun god and patron of truth and justice.
Because the autumn equinox once fell in this part of the sky, people still speak of the ‘First Point of Libra’. Precession ended that alignment around 730 BC.
The real constellation
Zubeneschamali, the brightest, was long described as the only greenish star visible to the naked eye; modern observers tend to see it as white or bluish, and nobody really explains the old impression.
From Brussels, Zubeneschamali climbs to 30 degrees and is highest around 10 pm in early July. In 2026 the Sun stands in front of Libra from 31 October to 23 November.
Its stars
Zubeneschamali
Magnitude 2.6, about 185 light years away. Its Arabic name means ‘the northern claw’, a reminder of the time when these stars belonged to the Scorpion.
Zubenelgenubi
A system that binoculars split: a blue-white star of magnitude 2.7 and a white companion of magnitude 5.2, about 75 light years away.
Brachium
It was called Gamma Scorpii until 1851, when Benjamin A. Gould moved it to Libra.
A star and its planets
Three planets are confirmed. When discovered in 2009, Gliese 581 e was the lowest-mass exoplanet known around an ordinary star.
In art and history
The zodiac’s only object started life as a pair of claws.
- BabylonMUL Zibanu, the scales of Shamash, god of the sun and of justice.
- Ptolemaic EgyptThe scales appear on the Dendera zodiac, now in the Louvre.
- Scientific atlasesIn 1690 Hevelius engraved a beam with two pans between Virgo and Scorpius.
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