SAN FRANCISCO  Astrologers, not surprisingly, say they knew this would happen.

But that didn’t stop a furious response among horoscope fans on Friday, as news shot around cyberspace  and, no doubt, outer space  that the world’s zodiac signs might somehow be out of whack, a development with potentially life-changing impact on professional and personal relationships, pickup lines in singles’ bars and, presumably, the day-to-day schedule of the former first lady Nancy Reagan.

All of which left professional prognosticators seeking to calm their followers, and astronomers chuckling at the fate of their more metaphysical brethren.

“Don’t panic,” Lawrence Grecco, who has worked for 20 years as astrologer and life coach in Manhattan, assured his clients. “Your sign is your sign.”

But such assurances did little to quell the cosmic kerfuffle after The Star Tribune in Minneapolis innocuously reported Monday that a naturally occurring wobble in the direction of the Earth’s axis  technically known as a “precession”  had altered the alignment of stars’ overhead from their traditional star signs, which date back several millennia. The report, citing Parke Kunkle, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, quickly went viral. Mr. Kunkle, suddenly cast as the Man Who Changed the Zodiac, said he had just been commenting on a well-known fact about the stars in relation to astrology.