Why does it seem that, whenever we humans can’t make any progress in solving a problem we just change the name of it in order to make it appear that we’re getting somewhere? Take abortion as an example, it’s been a contentious issue now for over fifty years which is why nobody refers to themselves as either pro-abortion or anti-abortion anymore. No, you’re either pro-choice or pro-life, public relations wise it’s always best to be pro-something rather than anti-anything.
Why do we humans always seem to try to hide our meanings? The issue is abortion but we have to use terms like pro-choice or pro-life. In the same way we hide the issue of flying saucers by first calling them UFOs and now UAPs. (Credit: The Survey center on American Life)
Now we’re doing the same thing with Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs that over the last seventy-five years have been the biggest and longest lasting conspiracy theory, see my post of 30 June 2022. Decade after decade has gone by with no better evidence for the existence of flying saucers than we had back in the 1950s. Still people insist that there has to be something going on so Congress decided to get involved and back on May 17th held meetings to discuss the latest sightings, including two films taken by Naval Aviators. Both the Pentagon and the Intelligence services were called upon to testify and just to let everybody know that they weren’t just sitting on their butts it was decided to change the name of UFOs to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon or UAP.
Some of the best new evidence for UFOs comes from naval aviators flying off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. This video is referred ton in the media as the ‘Go Fast’ video because the object in the video appears to be moving at impossible speeds Notice the numbers on both sides of the object in the center. They’ll become important later. (Credit: The Guardian)
Despite all of the ‘new evidence’, which once again is no better than the evidence we had in the 1950s, the military had to admit that it couldn’t explain all of the sightings but that there was no evidence that UFOs were either advanced aircraft built by our enemies, Russia or China, or Extra-Terrestrial in origin. The only decision made at the hearings was to have NASA get involved and see what the space agency thought about the whole matter. Which if you think about it is something the government probably should have done sixty years ago.
Filmed in Great Falls Montana in 1950 the Marianna UFO film, which you can check out on YouTube, is still completely unexplained and still as good of evidence for the existence of UFOs as anything presented since. (Credit: Journalnews)
So NASA gathered a panel of scientists, academicians and other technical experts, including an astronaut to form an ‘Independent Study Team’ to look into the matter. As a group the team is highly qualified, several are professors from major universities like George mason University, Boston University and UC San Diego. There are also several scientists from both private corporations and the US government including the FAA. The team chair is Dr. David Spergel of the Simons Foundation think tank and finally the team included former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year living on the International Space Station and whose brother, another former astronaut is now a Senator from Arizona.
NASA’s ‘Independent Study Group’ for the investigation into UFOs. There’s a lot of talent here but really this is something that should have been tried 60 years ago. (Credit: NASA Science)
On the 14th of September NASA released a report from the Independent Study Team that included analysis of some of the best known recent sightings but that also served to inform Congress of the expertise and scientific assets that NASA could bring to the study of UFOs. Indeed, much of the report, which you can read for yourself at the web address: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/uap_independent_study_team_-_final_report_0.pdf
reads something like a sales brochure for NASA. Throughout the report phrases like “NASA – with its extensive expertise in these domains and global reputation for scientific openness” or “NASA’s assets can play a vital role” show that the space agency would be happy to undertake a long term study of UFOs, with adequate funding of course.
It’s true, in order to do science somebody has to pay for it! NASA has always known that funding is key to space exploration. (Credit: SlidePlayer)
To show what NASA can do the report does include analysis of several well known recent sightings especially the ‘Go Fast’ video taken by a Naval Aviator flying off of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, a video that was shown at the congressional hearing back in May. From the measured data shown on the video itself and using a little simple mathematics the team was able to demonstrate that is was the Navy plane that was going fast, not the object it filmed. In fact the object was traveling no faster than 40 mph, and with the wind. The report confidently states that in all likelihood the UFO was drifting with the wind, in other words it was nothing more than a misidentified balloon.
The NASA teams explanation of the ‘Go Fast’ video shown in the figure above. Many UFO sightings happen when the observer is moving but thinks it’s the strange object they’re looking at is what’s moving. (Credit: NASA)At the same time as it’s studying UFOs NASA could use the money to study actual Phenomenon like the Red Sprites shown here. (Credit: NASA)
So, should the federal government fund NASA to conduct a long term examination of UFOs in the hope that when the final report is published everyone will accept it. As I said above this is something that might have made sense sixty years ago but today the ‘true believers’ on either side will never accept any answer but the one they want. My fear is that NASA will explain the great majority of the UFO sightings while at the same time there will always be a small percentage of ‘Unknowns’. This is the same situation that Project Blue Book wound up in sixty years ago and which only served to generate rumors that the federal Government was ‘hiding the truth’ about flying saucers, an accusation that NASA may very soon find itself to be the target of.
With all of the times that the government has kept the truth from us can you really blame people for thinking the same thing about UFOs? (Credit: Nixon Library)
If space aliens were actually visiting Earth, in such great numbers as UFO believers insist wouldn’t they have contacted us by now, or conquered us by now or at least have DONE SOMETHING BY NOW!
Back in the 1950s aliens flying around our skies kinda made sense. But after 75 years you’d think our visitors would have done something by now! (Credit: iMDB)
Whenever we think of the objects that archaeologists discover at ancient sites what usually comes to mind are items made of precious metals or jewels. Artifacts like king Tutankhamun’s death mask or the jewels of Helen found at Troy are certainly among the most famous of archaeological finds. These are the sorts of archaeological treasure than we commonly find displayed in museums.
Finding artifacts like King Tut’s death mask is what we usually think of as the work of archaeologists, but sometimes the things archaeologists study are far less material. (Credit: Joy of Museum’s Virtual Tour)
However there is another class of ancient ‘find’ that is far more valuable to archaeologists in their study of past cultures, language. Written records, whether on papyrus or vellum or even inscribed in stone can tell us much more about ancient peoples than gold or jeweled trinkets, if we can read them. Additionally there are the remains of bygone languages in the very words we use today, the study of which has it own special class of scholars, Philologists.
Ancient texts like this papyrus scroll can tell us much more about the lives of ancient people’s than any jewelry or weapons because it carries their thoughts on it. (Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Today’s post is about two examples of how archaeologists study long forgotten languages, and how, using the most modern of techniques they are learning more about ancient peoples by better understanding their languages.
While a conversation disappears once it’s finished the words that people use last longer and contain traces of the words people used thousands of years ago. (Credit: National Institute od Health)
One of the earliest forms of writing is cuneiform, a technique that was developed to record the language of the ancient people of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians. Basically a scribe would take a soft clay tablet and, using a reed cut to a special wedge shape, make triangular marks in the clay that could be read by another scribe. The clay tablets were then fired just like a piece of pottery, producing a written record that can last for millennia.
Perhaps the oldest form of writing is Sumerian Cuneiform as show here. Such tablets are more valuable than any golden jewelry to archaeologists. (Credit: Britannica)
The Mesopotamians recorded everything, inventories of livestock or grain, tax revenues, speeches by their kings and of course stories like the saga of Gilgamesh. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets have been excavated from scores of different sites along the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, writings that could contain a wealth of knowledge of the peoples of Mesopotamia.
Over the thousands of years it was used, 3500 BCE to 500 BCE, cuneiform changed quite a lot. Scholars studying ancient Mesopotamia have to learn all of the variations if they want to really understand the history of that early civilization. (Credit: Getty)
The problem is that so very few modern scholars can read Mesopotamian cuneiform, and because of damage to the tablet, often large sections are simply gone, it can take even an expert weeks to decipher a single record. Because of this only a small percentage of cuneiform tablets have ever been read. No one knows what priceless piece of history remains unknown simply because the tablet on which it is written lies unread in the basement of some museum.
All museums have storage rooms where objects not on display are kept. Many of these treasures have only had a cursory examination, their true importance is unrecognized until some researcher comes along and realizes how valuable they are. (Credit: Pinterest)
Enter a computer, an Artificial Intelligence algorithm to be exact. An interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and language historians, led by a Google software engineer and an Assyriologist from Arial University has trained an AI to perform translations of Mesopotamian cuneiform. After its development the AI was given a test of its abilities known as the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4, the same test that a human student of cuneiform would take as a evaluation. The AI’s score was better that the team had expected and good enough to be considered ‘High Quality Translations’.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) computers today can even learn ancient languages and translate ancient texts thousands of times faster than any human. (Credit: Live Science)
The AI model did show difficulty in understanding some of the nuances of translations, idioms that have no exact counterpart in English for example. Even with the occasional error however the fact that the AI could produce translations in seconds has led the researchers to suggest that it be used to translate inventories and other mundane writings. If the AI’s translation indicates that the tablet is something more interesting, a peace treaty between two warring cities for example, then a human translator can quickly check the work, just to be certain. With more experience the translation AI will be progressively better so that, in perhaps just a few years the massive backlog of cuneiform tablets will finally be read.
Cuneiform tablet containing part of the epic of Gilgamesh. How many ancient stories, both real and imagined, wait to be read in all of the cuneiform tablets that haven’t been translated yet! (Credit: No sweat Shakespear)
Clay tablets containing cuneiform markings are actual physical objects whose survival after thousands of years allows modern scholars to recreate the dead languages of ancient Mesopotamia, but how can anyone reconstruct a dead language for which there are no written records. That is the problem facing scholars who try to understand the origins of the large group of modern languages known as Indo-European.
Family chart of the modern Indo-European languages. All these languages, and many now forgotten, stem from one original ‘Proto-Indo-European’ language. (Credit: University of Ottawa)
So how do philologists know that certain languages, say English and Persian for example, are actually related, that they evolved from a common language, proto-Indo-European that was spoken in prehistoric times. The historic records give us a start. We know that in the 5th century CE Germanic tribes called the Angles and the Saxons invaded Roman Britain and the language they spoke became modern English, so English is a dialect of German. Or we can look at the number of similar words, like how the English Water = German Wasser, or Mother = Mütter, or Morning = Morgen and etc. In the same way we know that modern Italian, Spanish and French all descend from Latin.
Here the English word ‘Two’ and all of its Indo-European counterparts are traced back to an ancestral Proto-Indo-European word ‘dwoh’. (Credit: Starkey Comics)
Then, in the late 19th century British Officers serving in India came upon a number of ancient scrolls in Sanskrit, the ancient ancestor to modern Hindi. Those officers, educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, were shocked to realize that Sanskrit was an awful lot like Greek, so Sanskrit and therefore Hindi are a part of the Indo-European languages.
Ancient Sanskrit compared to several modern languages, including Hindi. (Credit: Quora)
Today there are over 160 languages that are recognized as being a part of the Indo-European group, including more than 50 that are officially dead, that is, no one alive today speaks them as their primary tongue. Nearly half the people in the world speak an Indo-European language.
Today most of the world speaks an Indo-European language. (Credit: Reddit)
So the questions of where and when was the original proto-Indo-European language spoken is one of the most important in all of anthropology. Many theories have been proposed, often without much evidence and much blood has been spilled in the arguments.
With so many different peoples speaking Indo-European languages the question becomes, who were the original Proto-Indo-Europeans? (Credit: Pinterest)
I’m not kidding about the blood, before World War 2 the Nazi maintained that Germany was the site of the original proto-Indo-Europeans, whom they called the ‘Aryans’ and that they were the pure descendants of the Aryans, everyone else being of ‘inferior’ blood. Such was the basis for their racial cleansing and the holocaust.
Hitler and the Nazi used a bastardy version of real archaeology and anthropology to justify their murder of millions of people they didn’t consider real ‘Aryans’. (Credit: CEU Press)
Most modern scholarship however considers that the steppes of Russia-Ukraine directly north of the Black Sea or the area of the Caucus Mountains where Turkey, Iran and Armenia come together are the likeliest places for the proto-Indo-Europeans with a time frame between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. Now an international team of linguists and geneticists led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have established the largest ever dataset of both language and genetic correlations of Indo-European words and people.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany is a leading center for the true study of how the human species evolved and how civilization developed. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Using a computer algorithm the team performed a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of all of their data. What the analysis concluded was that the original home of the Indo-European languages was in the Caucus mountains of eastern Anatolia about 8,100 years ago but that by 7,000 years ago there was already a split into five main branches with many going to the steppe region north of the Black Sea. In other words the answer appears to be a mixture of the two leading theories.
First appearing in the region around Modern eastern Turkey and Armenia about 8,000 years ago the Indo-European people spread to both the east and west. (Credit: Phys.org)
Language is very much a part of the foundation of civilization; as such it is one of the primary concerns of anthropology and archaeology. Studying the language of ancient peoples is essential in order to understand their lives.
When it comes to getting your money’s worth NASA certainly can’t complain about the two Voyager space probes that were launched way back in 1977. After having accomplished all of their mission objectives by visiting the gas giant planets of, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune the spacecraft are still operating, sending back priceless data after 45 years in space. Now the two probes have left our solar system and are in interstellar space giving scientists their first in situ measurements of conditions in the void between the stars.
Like a classic car that, with careful maintenance just keeps getting better with age, the two Voyager space probes have proven their value a dozen times over. (Credit: BBC)
So when a problem occurs with such a venerable spacecraft it gets a lot of attention from the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratories (JPL) who built and have managed the Voyager missions from the beginning. Especially when they caused the problem. You see the trouble happened on the 21st of July when a series or routine orders meant to align Voyager 2’s antenna so that it was correctly aimed at Earth contained a typo that instead caused the antenna to point in the wrong direction, a full 2º away from our planet. As a result Voyager 2 was unable to either send or receive any signal from Earth.
Like a telescope a dish antenna aims its signals at a very precise point in the sky. If that aiming is just slightly off, communications failure! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Thankfully Voyager 1 was unaffected and the good news was that Voyager 2 is programmed to automatically realign back to Earth several times a year so whatever else happened the spacecraft would try to reconnect on October 15th. Nevertheless NASA was determined to reestablish communication with Voyager 2 before then.
The Voyager probes were built by, and are still managed by the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory in Pasadena, California. If those guys can’t fix a problem, nobody can! (Credit: Jet Propulsion Labouratory – NASA)
The first thing for NASA to try was to see if they could pick up Voyager 2’s signal using the biggest antenna they had, the giant dish antenna outside Australia’s capitol Canberra. That large dish is a part of NASA’s Deep Space Network that keeps in contact with our most distant probes. On the 2nd of August the Canberra receivers succeeded in picking up what JPL termed Voyager 2’s “heartbeat”. It was therefore decided to try to send the correct signal to the probe in the hopes of restoring full communications. Adding to the complications is the fact that the spacecraft is so far away from Earth that it takes 18 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 2, and another 18 hours for any reply to come back.
NASA’s Deep Space Network handles the communications for all of NASA’s interplanetary probes and is highlighted by the big 34 meter dish antenna outside Canberra, Australia. (Credit: YouTube)
Despite all the difficulties on the 7th of August NASA succeeded in regaining full communications with Voyager 2, a marvel considering how old, and how far away Voyager 2 is. So we are still getting priceless data about interstellar space from humanity’s oldest still active spacecraft, Voyager 2 was actually launched before Voyager 1.
The launch of Voyager 2 back on 20 August 1977. How many of our TVs or Radios or other electronics from back then are still working? (Credit: Universe Today)
Two other unmanned space probes have also been making some news this past month as both Russia and India attempted to land spacecraft on the Moon. For Russian this was the first time in 47 years that they had tried to land on our nearest neighbor while for India it is their growing space program’s first attempt at a landing on any other world.
Hoping to be the first nation to successfully land near the Moon’s south pole Russia also hoped that Luna 25 would revive their once mighty deep space exploration program. (Credit: AP News)
Although Indian’s Chandrayaan-3 probe was launched first, back on July 14th, it was Russia’s Luna 25 that first attempted a landing on the 19th of August with a result that was a complete disaster for the Russian space program. As the lander was starting its descent an engine misfire caused a crash landing with the complete loss of the spacecraft.
The crash of LUNA 25 caused the crater in the center of this image and was another in a long series of disappointments for the Russian space program. (Credit: BBC)
Chandrayaan-3’s attempt four days later was more successful making India only the forth nation to soft land a spacecraft on the Moon. The landing also marked the first time any spacecraft had landed near the Moon’s south pole, a region that may become very important in the coming years as it is thought that deposits of water ice could be hidden there, water that could help sustain a future Lunar base or colony. In addition to an array of instruments to study the surface Chandrayaan-3 also carries a small rover that will operate for at least one Lunar day, which lasts 14 Earth days.
Image of the Chandrayaan-3 lander on the Lunar surface taken by its small rover. Both spacecraft represent a big success for India’s growing space program. (Credit: The Times of India)Image of the Chabdrayaan 3 Rover taken by the main lander. (Credit: Hindustan Times)
The results of the two Moon landings may be a sign of what is to come for both countries with India on the way up while Russia is on its way down. As the Soviet Union, Russia was once the clear leader in space exploration but the country’s last major achievement by itself in space was the MIR space station back in the 1990s. Since then Russia has been in a downward spiral with Vladimir Putin robbing its treasury to keep his oligarchs happy while starting fruitless wars against his neighbors.
Vladimir Putin is more interested in grabbing pieces of his neighbors territory than he is in making the lives of his people better let alone in the exploration of space. (Credit: U. S. Naval Institute)
India, on the other hand has been steadily growing both in terms of its economy and its access to technology. India’s space program is a sign of that growth and a source of national pride. With the landing of Chandrayaan-3 India becomes part of an elite group space faring nations with even more ambitious plans for the future.
Now India has even succeeded in sending another probe to study the Sun! With plans to launch a manned mission in 3-4 years India is set to become a space powerhouse. (Credit: Space.com)
There is also some news about manned spaceflight and again it’s all about Space X and Boeing. On August 25th the Crew Seven mission was successfully launched to the International Space Station (ISS) with one of Space X’s Dragon capsules atop one of their Falcon 9 rockets. This mission is Space X’s 11th manned spaceflight and the seventh to send a full crew to the ISS under NASA’s commercial crew program.
A night time launch started NASA’s crew 7 crew on their way to the ISS. They successfully docked less than 24 hours later. (Credit: Austin County News)
The four astronauts aboard Dragon come from four different nations, all a part of the ISS consortium. Commander Jasmin Moghbeli is a former US Marine pilot now with NASA while the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Andreas Morgensen is from Denmark. Rounding out the crew are mission specialist Satoshi Furukawa from Japan and Russia’s Konstantin Borisov. All four will remain aboard the ISS for six months in what has become standard operating procedure thanks to Space X.
Five days after the arrival of the Crew 7 astronauts the Crew 6 team returned to Earth in what is becoming a routine operation. (Credit: Space News)
Meanwhile Boeing, which was expected to compete with Space X for missions to and from the ISS, has had a seemingly endless series of problems with its Starliner space capsule. Last April Boeing finally succeeded in sending an unmanned Starliner capsule to the ISS as a test flight and it was hoped that a final, crewed test flight would take place by the end of the year.
NASA planned on Boeing’s Starliner (l) competing with Space X’s Dragon capsule (r). It hasn’t worked out that way. The score to date is eleven manned missions for Space X to zero for Boeing! (Credit: Florida Today)
Complications arose with the capsule’s parachute system however along with some adhesive that could pose a fire risk under certain circumstances. The work of satisfying NASA’s rigid safety protocols grew and grew until now it seems as if that final manned test flight of Starliner will not take place until March of 2023 at the earliest.
In May of 2022 the parachutes worked well on Starliner’s unmanned test flight. Nevertheless Boeing has had problems with the system and parachutes are one system you want to be certain are going to work perfectly. (Credit: EarthSky)
Despite all of their difficulties with Starliner Boeing insists they are committed to the program, having secured enough parts to build a further six capsules. If Starliner does succeed in taking astronauts to the ISS early next year it is hoped that the first crew mission could take place just about a year from now. Going forward then Space X and Boeing would alternate crew staffing missions until the end of the ISS program that is expected to be in 2030.
Now scheduled to continue in operation until 2030, the International Space Station is humanity’s first real home away from Earth. (Credit: Scientific American)
Even with all of the problems, space exploration is expanding with more countries like India becoming involved, with private companies like Space X reducing costs and with new missions to explore our solar system and the infinite beyond.
The legend of the Loch Ness Monster dates back at least to the year 565 CE when a Christian missionary named Saint Columba traveling near the loch used the power of God to drive a colossal beast back into the water. For the next 1400 years there were occasional local stories about the beastie but to the world at large the Loch Ness monster remained little known.
Loch Ness in Scotland as seen from the air. It’s really not that big and for a ‘monster’ to hide there all these centuries? (Credit: Wikivoyage)
That all changed in the 1930s when first there was a sighting by the manageress of the Drumnadrochit Hotel that was reported in the press as a ‘water beast’ in the loch. But the Loch Ness monster really came to the attention of the world in 1934 when a photo of the ‘monster’ was purportedly taken a London gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson and published in the Daily Mail.
First published in The Daily Mail in April of 1934 this image from Loch Ness made the monster a household word. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)
That photo, see above, showed a long necked, large bodied creature reminiscent of something from the age of the dinosaurs. Based on Doctor Wilson’s photo the idea that ‘Nessie’ was a plesiosaur that somehow escaped the extinction of the dinosaurs took hold and since then many attempts have been undertaken to obtain concrete evidence of the monster’s existence.
An aquatic reptile from the age of the dinosaurs the plesiosaur has become the ‘de facto’ Loch Ness Monster. (Credit: Dinosaur Database)
As the years went by those searches became ever more technically advanced with motion picture cameras and even sonar being used to find Nessie. All to no avail as expedition after expedition failed to find anything more than grainy images of something causing ripples in the still waters of the loch. The last big search for the monster was back in 1972 when over a hundred observers spent days keeping watch on every stretch of the 40-kilometer long loch. Nothing was found. Nessie remained a mystery.
In 1969 a miniature submarine was even launched in the loch to try to find ‘Nessie’. It found nothing! (Credit: The Independent)
Which is hardly surprising because, in addition to no solid evidence, there are many good arguments against any group of really large animals living in the loch, especially leftovers from the age of the dinosaurs. First off, the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago but Loch Ness is a glacial lake formed during the ice ages and is less that 100,000 year old! So how did a group of plesiosaurs survive for 66 million years while waiting for Loch Ness to form?
Loch Ness formed back during the ice age as a glacier gouged a deep canyon in the Earth. When the glacier melted it left a lake that we now call Loch Ness. Therefore Loch Ness is less than 100,000 years old and could not have protected any plesiosaurs from the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Even more troubling, Loch Ness is not a very fertile body of water, there’s very little vegetation to serve as the basis of a food chain. It’s been estimated that the supply of food in the loch could not support more than a dozen large Nessie sized animals, far to small for a breeding population. And last of all, that very famous picture of the monster taken in 1934 was finally revealed to be a hoax. The last survivor of the original group that made the photograph confessed in a 1999 book that the monster was in fact a toy submarine they’d bought at Woolworth’s and to which they added a plastic head and neck. The toy was then floated in the loch and several photos taken, Doctor Wilson didn’t even take the pictures but he was in on the hoax, passing the images along to the Daily Mail. Ever since the image had first been published experts had pointed out that there was nothing in the picture but the creature making it impossible to judge how big the thing was.
The reality of that famous picture of Nessie. (Credit: PBS)
Still none of that has stopped people from trying to find the beastie. And now the biggest hunt since 1972 is ready to try again and again with the latest in technology. The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau (LNIB) has joined forces with Loch Ness Exploration (LNE) to again cover the loch with more than a hundred pairs of eyes but this time they will also have drones surveying the loch from above, some with infrared cameras to help spot Nessie by body heat. (By the way, if Nessie is a reptile then it’d be cold-blooded and invisible in the infrared!)
So here we go again. Another search that will undoubtedly find a few ‘tantalizing hints’ but no real evidence. (Credit: CNN)
Thanks to the Internet even people around the world can join in. Volunteers sitting at home can observe the loch through one of the many cameras that are being set up. If anything unusual is spotted the volunteer can then raise an alarum so that more people and instruments are concentrated to the site of the possible sighting. The ‘researchers’ running this expedition, which has been dubbed ‘the quest’ have even promised that all of the findings will be collated and analyzed for publishing.
The only good thing to say about Nessie is that the monster does bring tourists to Scotland! (Credit: Time)
Why? I’m sorry but I have to ask that question. If there were a group of large animals living in what is actually a small body of water they would surely have been discovered by now. A million people a year visit Loch Ness and every one of them, even the doubters at least look for Nessie. And by this time wouldn’t a dead carcass of one of them washed ashore. Let’s not forget that plesiosaurs are air breathing reptiles, so like dolphins they have to raise their heads above the surface of the water on a regular basis.
Just this year a dozen dead whales have floated onto east coast beaches. If there was some large animal living in Loch Ness, after all these centuries wouldn’t the dead body of one of them been washed ashore??? (Credit: NPR)
So by now it’s really time to give up on Nessie. We’ve looked in every corner of Loch Ness and the creature simply isn’t there. In fact we humans now so dominate this planet that there is little chance, very little chance of there being any animal larger than ourselves existing that isn’t known to science.
A still from the famous movie of Bigfoot. A man in a gorilla suit, what do you want to bet? Like all mythical creatures it’s difficult to separate the hoaxes from honest sightings and in the end no real evidence of anything! (Credit: MendoFever)
And the money that is being spent on searches of Loch Ness, or searches for Bigfoot or other mythical creatures, could be better spent on expeditions in the Amazon or other under-explored areas of the world. If carried out by actual naturalists such expeditions could easily find a hundred totally new species of insect with another hundred of other kinds of invertebrate and maybe a few vertebrate species as well.
Biologists estimate the half of the world’s insects are still waiting to be discovered. What if the money being wasted on Nessie and Bigfoot and all the other mythical creatures was used to look for creatures we know exist. (Credit: Etsy)
That money would then actually serve to increase our knowledge of the natural world, instead of just being wasted looking for something that was never there to begin with.
We humans like to place the objects we find into distinct categories, male or female, dog or cat, living or non-living. Nature doesn’t really work that way however, the edges between different classes of objects are often quite fuzzy. Take stars and planets for example, back in my post of 22 September 2021, I discussed an relatively new class of objects called brown dwarfs, objects that are too heavy to be planets, but too light to be stars.
Brown Dwarfs are too big to be planets but too small to ignite the fusion processes that power regular stars. (Credit: EarthSky)
Strictly speaking brown dwarfs do not have enough mass to cause the pressure and temperature at their core to ignite the process of hydrogen fusion. They are larger than planets however and do emit some infrared light because the gasses they are made of continue to collapse due to gravity and that shrinking generates heat.
Strictly speaking the planet Jupiter is actually emitting a little more energy than it receives from the Sun because even after 4 billion years it is still shrinking. (Credit: European Space Agency)
One of the smallest, and coolest brown dwarfs ever discovered is known as WISE J062309.94-045624.6, (I’ll just call it J06 from now on) which is located about 7 light years from our solar system. The size and mass of J06 are only approximately known, its diameter is between 0.95 and 0.65 that of Jupiter while it’s mass is at least four time Jupiter’s, but not more than 44 times. We do have a rather accurate measurement of it’s surface temperature however, around 425ºC making it about as hot as a wood burning fireplace.
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Experiment or WISE space telescope searches the sky for objects that are only emitting light in the infrared. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Being so cool it was something of a surprise therefore when observations of J06 by the CSIRO ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia showed that the dwarf was broadcasting periodically at frequencies between 0.9 and 2.0 Giga-Hertz (That’s between 900 million and 2 billion cycles per second). These observations were later confirmed with the Australia Telescope Compact Array and South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope.
Unlike the images we get from Hubble or ground based telescope this is the sort of data we get from radio telescopes. These are some of the actual measurements from J06. (Credit: IOPscience-Institute of Physics)
The time period for the radio emissions was found to be about 1.91 hours which is thought to be the time it takes the dwarf to rotate on its axis, its day that is. An analysis of the data from J06 by researchers at the University of Sydney, including lead author Ph.D. candidate Kovi Rose has led to the conclusion that the dwarf possesses a magnetic field of greater than 700 gauss that is generating the radio emissions.
University of Sidney Ph.D candidate Kovi Rose. (Credit: Cosmos Magazine)
Only a small number of Brown Dwarfs have been discovered so far by astronomers and there is much we don’t know about this class of celestial objects. Only by finding more dwarfs, maybe by using their radio emissions to detect them, can we learn more about these objects.
South Africa’s MeerKAT antenna array is becoming one of the centers for the study of Brown Dwarfs. (Credit:
Unlike normal stars, Brown Dwarfs are studied by observing them in the infrared or radio portions of the electro-magnetic (EM) spectrum. One hundred years ago such observations could not have been carried out simply because the instruments needed to detect infrared and radio energy did not exist. Today however astronomers also have instruments that allow them to observe in the Ultra-Violet and X-ray portions of the EM spectra so that we can “see” the Universe in those lights as well.
Since X-rays are quickly absorbed by out atmosphere astronomers have to study them using space telescopes like the Chandra X-Ray probe shown here. (Credit: NASA)
More than that, today astronomers can even make observations of the Universe using Cosmic Ray particles and Gravity Waves, see my posts of 14 June 2017 and 22 October 2017. In fact every time that astronomers have found a new way to observe the Universe, a new form of energy with which to make astronomical studies, they have discovered whole new kinds of celestial objects and learned even more about the objects they already knew.
The LIGO observatory was the first to detect and study the Universe using gravity waves instead of light. (Credit: LIGO Caltech)
One type of radiation that astronomers that tried for a long time to employ are neutrinos, those ghost like sub-atomic particles that can pass through the entire Earth with hardly any of them interacting. That’s why neutrinos are so hard to use for astronomical observations, you need huge detectors, and lots of time, in order to catch just a few of them.
In order to capture just a few neutrinos you need huge detectors buried deep underground. (Credit: Nature)
That hasn’t stopped astronomers and astrophysicists from trying to use neutrinos however. The first time was a neutrino detector buried in the Homestake mine in South Dakota that was designed to detect neutrinos produced by the process of hydrogen fusion deep within the Sun. This experiment ran from 1970 to 1994 and taught us a great deal about both the Sun and neutrinos. Then, in 1987 the first supernova in our galaxy for over 300 years was detected and just as astrophysicists had predicted the Sudbury neutrino experiment detected about a dozen neutrinos from the distant event.
Buried in a massive glacier in Antarctica the Ice Cube neutrino detector is by volume the largest scientific experiment ever built. (Credit: Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory)
Now astronomers have constructed the largest, in terms of volume, experiment ever in the ice covered continent of Antarctica. The Ice Cube Telescope as it is known uses the fact that when a neutrino does interact with more normal matter it causes the emission of a few photons of light, photons that can travel a considerable distance through the Antarctic ice.
The scientists who operate Ice Cube live right above their instrument in this building near the south pole. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The Ice Cube Telescope was constructed with a full cubic kilometer of glacial ice near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Drilling holes down into the ice scientists buried over 5,000 light detectors so that they could detect the light generated by any neutrinos that were absorbed in that cubic kilometer of ice. Despite its huge size the Ice Cube detector still only captures a small number of neutrinos every day so, like taking a picture in very low light, in order to form any kind of image a long exposure time was required.
Taking a picture at night or in any low light conditions requires a time exposure like in the image here. (Credit: Visual Wilderness)
In fact it took over 10 years to collect 60,000 neutrino generated collisions and a special computer algorithm in order to form the first ever neutrino image of our Milky Way galaxy. Researchers from Drexel University’s Department of Physics Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, Associate Professor along with graduate student Steve Sclafani performed the processing that produced the image shown below.
The way our Milky way galaxy looks in radio (top), optical and gamma rays and now in neutrinos (bottom). (Credit: American Physical Society)Naoko Kurahashi Neilson in her office at Drexel University and at the Ice Cube observatory in Antarctica. (Credit: UMKC WordPress)
This picture represents the birth of an entirely new kind of astronomy, neutrino astronomy. Right now we can only guess what neutrino images will tell us about the objects we already know about, but more importantly what new kinds of astronomical objects will be discovered using neutrinos.
I’m certain that it won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with this blog that I’m very much concerned with Climate Change / Global Warming and in fact with environmental issues in general. I know that more and more of my posts lately have been devoted to the damage that we ourselves are doing to our planet. I guess I’m just trying to do what I can to educate people about how bad the climate crisis is, and how much worse it could get.
The latest climate crisis I never imagined happening are the wildfires raging across the Hawaiian islands. Maui in particular has been devastated. (Credit: BBC)
So in this post I’m going to review a book by an author who is much better suited to give the warning about climate change than I am. Bill McGuire is Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London and was a contributing scientist to the 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since that time Professor McGuire has written numerous articles for periodicals about the coming dangers of global warming as well as the book I’ll be reviewing today, ‘Hothouse Earth, an Inhabitants Guide’.
Cover art for ‘Hothouse Earth’ by Bill McGuire
Professor Bill McGuire is one of the World’s leading climatologists and the author of several books on the coming climate crisis. (Credit: UCL)
Professor McGuire begins at the beginning, two hundred and fifty years ago with the invention by Richard Arkwright of a mechanical loom for the production of cotton thread, an invention that is often sited as the beginning of the industrial revolution. While that first mechanical loom was powered by a water wheel subsequent versions were soon powered by James Watt’s coal burning steam engine and so began the connection between industry and carbon emissions. In ‘Hothouse Earth’ Professor McGuire often returns to the day of Richard Arkwright as being his baseline for the days before humanity began dumping huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Often called the father of the Industrial Revolution Richard Arkwright invented the water driven loom shown here. (Credit: Study.com)
‘Hothouse Earth’ then presents a brief outline of those scientists who studied the effect that CO2 in the atmosphere has on the planet’s temperature. It was the American chemist Eunice Foote who in 1856 demonstrated that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, trapping the Sun’s energy so that it warms our planet. Then just forty years later it was Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius who developed the first climate models for how Earth’s temperature would change depending on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Based on the amount of coal that was being burned back in 1900 Arrhenius even predicted that we would be seeing the effects of global warming just about now! As Professor McGuire puts it “No one can say we weren’t warned!”
Besides predicting global warming over 125 years ago Svante Arrhenius was also executor of Alfred Nobel’s will and therefore the person who actually set up the Nobel prizes, winning a chemistry one himself in 1903. (Credit: Energy Education)
With his background in geology Professor McGuire is well versed in how the Earth’s temperature has changed in the past, from ice ages to long periods when the planet was so warm that the polar ice caps completed melted. Throughout ‘Hothouse Earth’ Professor McGuire uses examples from those past eras to illustrate what our climate will be like before long, while repeatedly pointing out that the climate of our planet today is changing faster than it ever has.
Geologically planet Earth is actually in an ice age period. The fact that it is burning up is completely our doing! (Credit: www.history.com)
The meat of ‘Hothouse Earth’ is a long survey of the ways that climate change is going to make our planet a much worse place to live. In addition to more sever weather, both droughts and flooding, there’s rising sea levels, more massive wildfires, ocean acidification, the spread of tropical diseases etc, etc. Those are the direct effects of climate change but as Professor McGuire points out the growing scarcity of water and food, along with large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable will combine to drive migrations of whole populations, and greatly increase the chances for future conflict.
Global warming isn’t just a disaster on land. The warming of the oceans is killing the coral reefs where half of all marine life exists. (Credit: NBC News)
It’s not a pretty picture and Professor McGuire doesn’t try to sugarcoat what’s coming. In fact he’s well aware that many people will regard him as an alarmist and he refuses to apologize for it, insisting that raising the alarm on climate change is a good thing. At the same time ‘Hothouse Earth’ also takes aim at both the climate deniers and the geoengineers who hope to invent some technical ‘fix’ to negate global warming. You may have heard on the news one or more of the many ideas put forward that propose to either reflect some of the Sun’s energy before it warms the Earth or suck all of the CO2 out of the air so that we can continue to burn all of the fossil fuels we want.
There are a lot of ‘ideas’ going around right now to ‘fix’ the climate crisis. None are as cheap or as sure, or as safe as simply stopping the burning of fossil fuels! (Credit: Phys.org)
While the deniers are simply obstinate fools the geoengineers at least recognize that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Their plans so far however vary between dangerous, like spraying massive amounts of sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to simulate the cooling caused by volcanic eruptions to simply much too expensive. We already know what the solution to global warming is, we’ve known it all along, stop burning fossil fuels.
There simply can’t be anybody who thinks this is a good thing. But far too many people think it’s profitable and in our world money is more important than goodness! (Credit: BONews)
‘Hothouse Earth’ isn’t a fun read, it isn’t meant to be. It is meant to raise the alarm because everyday now we hear about record setting temperatures in Dallas and Beijing, wildfires in Canada, droughts across Africa and on and on. We really are at a tipping point, it is thought that we could see a 1.5ºC temperature rise since Richard Arkwright’s time this very year. That 1.5ºC rise is thought by many climatologists to be a level where the effects of global warming increase significantly so we really are running out of time.
The hottest month ever measured and now officially over the 1.5 degree threshold scientists have been warning us about, July of 2023 will be long remembered as when the climate crisis began in earnest. (Credit: BBC)
In other words things could be getting a lot worse real soon. If you want to do something about it then I strongly suggest that ‘Hothouse Earth’ by Bill McGuire is a good place to start.
On July 1st the American space corporation Space X successfully launched the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Euclid space telescope and set it on course for its final destination the Lagrangian L2 point that lies about 1 million kilometers from Earth. The spacecraft spent the about thirty days on that journey, reaching its destination at the end of the month. (For more information on the Lagrangian points see my blog posts of 6 January 2017 and 29 January 2022). This is the same location that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was sent to and for the same reason. Since both telescopes observe the Universe in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum they both have to get as far away as they can from the heat of our planet, which would swamp their infrared detectors. Unlike JWST however Euclid will also operate in the visible spectrum.
Artists impression of the ESA’s Euclid space telescope at its L2 Lagrangian position. (Credit: BBC)
With a main mirror of 1.2 meters in diameter Euclid is a less powerful telescope than JWST but it is designed to survey a larger portion of the sky with each observation. That was dictated by Euclid’s six-year mission to determine the distances and redshifts of millions of galaxies spread across approximately one third of the sky. Redshift in the light coming from a distant galaxy is caused by the general expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang and tells astronomers exactly how fast that galaxy is moving away from our own Milky Way.
First Images from the Euclid Space Telescope. The left image is in the visible spectrum while the right is in the infrared. The results are everything astronomers hoped for and they are very excited! (Credit: SciTechDaily)We’re all familiar with how the Doppler effect causes sirens coming towards us to have a higher pitch than those going away. The same thing happens to light with a shift to the blue meaning the light source is coming towards you while a red shift means it’s going away. (Credit: StudiousGuy)
By making these observations it is hoped that Euclid will give astrophysicists insight into how the expansion of the Universe has changed over the last 10 billion, which in turn will provide some clues about the nature of Dark Energy. At the same time Euclid will study the effect of gravitational lensing on the light coming from distant galaxies. By studying this effect astrophysicists hope to learn more about Dark Matter.
An Einstein ring is caused by the strong gravity of the bright galaxy in the center of this image bending the light from another galaxy behind it into a ring shape. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Together Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the two greatest mysteries in science today. Think about it, physicists estimate that some 95% of the energy in the Universe comes in forms that we know almost nothing about. Physicists first began thinking about Dark Matter more than 50 years ago and although we’ve tried many ideas as to what Dark Matter could be so far none of them have been confirmed. (For more about Dark Matter see my post of 19 June 2019).
According to our best theories this is the composition of the Universe. We understand the 5%, the rest is all guesswork. (Credit: Wickersham’s Conscience)
Most of what we know about Dark Matter comes from the way its gravity effects shape and motions of galaxies, a study known as galactic dynamics. Recently the way that Dark Matter’s gravity can bend the light coming from galaxies behind it has also been studied. By observing this effect for millions of galaxies it is expected that Euclid will provide a better understanding of how Dark Matter is distributed throughout space.
Galaxies upon galaxies, seemingly without end. That’s our Universe! (Credit: The Atlantic)
Dark Energy on the other hand is simply a name cosmologists have given to whatever force it is that is causing the Universe to not only expand but accelerate in that expansion, we literally know nothing else about it. One thing that cosmologists most what to know about is whether Dark Energy is a constant, like the ‘cosmological constant’ in Einstein’s field equations, or is it dynamic, does it’s strength change with time. The very fate of the Universe is at stake here for if Dark Energy is strictly constant then most of the other galaxies in the Universe will one day move so far away as to become invisible, leaving only the Milky Way and a few of its close neighbors as all of the Universe there is to be seen.
We thought that gravity would cause the expansion of the Universe to slow down but instead it is accelerating. We call whatever it is that is causing the acceleration ‘Dark Energy’ and we really know almost nothing about it. (Credit: The Conversation)
If however Dark Energy gets stronger with time then the force of expansion will grow into a ‘Big Rip’ where every single particle in the Universe is repelled by every other particle and no structure of any kind exists. On the other hand, what if Dark Energy should reverse itself, becoming an attraction rather than a repulsion. In that case the expansion of the Universe could come to a stop and become a contraction eventually leading to a ‘Big Crunch’, the opposite of the Big Bang.
There are a lot of ideas out there about how our Universe could end. None of them pleasant! (Credit: Reddit)
It is questions like that that astronomers hope Euclid will provide some answers to. At the same time it is also expected that during its survey of the sky the Euclid spacecraft will discover many unusual objects that will be studied in detail by more powerful telescopes like JWST. The data sent back by Euclid will be shared amongst more than 1200 astronomers and astrophysicists in 15 countries, basically the European Union plus the UK, Canada and the US.
The data sent back by the Euclid space telescope will compliment that sent back from JWST. Hopefully together they will tell us something about Dark Energy and Dark Matter. (Credit: Science News)The father of Geometry we all learned about Euclid in High School. (Credit: Biography Online)
Ever since Einstein we’ve known that gravity effects the very geometry of space-time. By providing us with details about the nature of Dark Energy and Dark Matter the Euclid spacecraft will teach us a great deal about the overall geometry of the Universe, following in the footsteps of Euclid of Alexandria, the founder of geometry.
In these blog posts I have often mentioned that most of what we know about ancient life forms comes from examining the fossilized ‘hard parts’, the bones and shells of those creatures. Plants and animals without such hard parts, like jellyfish, slugs or many kinds of worms leave few traces in the fossil record and only a few fossil sites, like the famous Burgess Shale, give us a window into the soft bodied life forms of the past.
Nearly all fossils are the remains of the ‘Hard Parts’ of ancient animals, the soft flesh is rarely preserved. (Credit: FiveThirtyEight)Fossils of animals without any hard parts, like this jellyfish, are extremely rare and hence extremely valuable to paleontologists. (Credit: The University of Kansas)
Even rarer is fossil evidence for single celled organisms like amoebas, algae or bacteria. Because of that we have little to no evidence to illustrate most of the evolution of life here on Earth. Seriously, most researchers think that the first life forms on our planet originated more than 3.5 billion years ago. Multi-cellular creatures however only appeared about 650 million years ago so for the first 3 billion years or so Earth was inhabited only by single celled organisms. Our understanding of how single celled life evolved from mere bags of organic material to cells complex enough to develop into multi-cellular creatures is mostly theories with only bits of evidence to back them up.
For most of the history of Earth living things were single celled creatures like this Amoeba. Creatures that left little fossil evidence leaving us with a lot of theories of how early life evolved but few facts. (Credit: KLive Science)
One problem in particular is time lapse between when our theories say that the first eukaryotic cells should have evolved, some 1.6 billion years ago, and the first unmistakable signs of their existence some 800 years later. Now, what is a eukaryotic cell and why is the timing of their development so important? Let me take a minute or two to explain.
Prokaryotes, like this bacteria, have little internal structure. The various parts of their metabolism, including their DNA, just kind of float in their cytoplasm. (Credit: Javatpoint)
As I said above the first living things here on earth were probably little more than bags of organic compounds, some RNA, maybe DNA, proteins for structure with fats and carbohydrates for energy. There was little or no structure inside the bag as the different types of compounds just mixed together. Modern bacteria and blue-green algae are still very much like this and as a group such ‘primitive’ cells are called prokaryotes from the Greek words ‘pro’ meaning before and ‘karyon’ meaning kernel, the kernel in this case being a cell nucleus where a cell’s genetic material is kept safe. So a prokaryote is a single celled creature without a nucleus.
Eukaryotes, like an amoeba or every cell in your body, have a much more complicated internal structure with many ‘organelles’ like the mitochondria, or Golgi Bodies or the Nucleus itself where the cells DNA is kept protected. (Credit: News Medical)
Cells with a nucleus are referred to as eukaryotes, cells with a kernel. Such cells include single celled creatures like amoeba and paramecium but also all of the cells of all multi-cellular organisms, plants or animals including all of the cells of your body. In addition to a nucleus eukaryotic cells usually also possess other structures as well like mitochondria, ribosomes and my personal favourite the endoplasmic reticulum. Obviously the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes was an important moment in the history of life and so an 800 million year gap in when we think they should have evolved and when we have good evidence that they did evolve is a big problem.
Simplified view of how the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes began. Problem is that this process is very difficult to confirm in the fossil record. (Credit: Understanding Evolution)
Now single celled organisms, whether they be bacteria or amoeba rarely fossilize. So instead of looking for the actual remains of eukaryotes in ancient rocks paleochemists look for chemical traces, that is traces of complex chemicals that are produced by eukatyotes but not by prokaryotes. The chemicals that paleochemists were looking for are the familiar group known as steroids, especially the steroid cholesterol. These chemicals are very useful for living cells because of their ability to allow cells to survive in a wider range of temperatures, repeated de-hydration and re-hydration as well as enduring high levels of ultraviolet light.
Cholesterol is one of a class of chemicals known as Steroids. Despite their bad press Steroids, including Cholesterol are very important to the functioning of our metabolism. (Credit: Saylordotorg.github.io)
Producing steroids however requires a lot of oxygen and a billion years ago the Earth’s atmosphere had very little of the gas. That led the researchers to propose a new theory, that between 1.6 and 800 million years ago an intermediate form of eukaryotic-like organisms dominated the Earth. These intermediate eukaryotic-like cells could not produce full steroids, or crown steroids as they are known but only simpler protosteroids and hence the intermediate cell forms are known collectively as the ‘Protosterol biota’.
Artist’s concept of what the ‘Protosterol Biota’ could have looked like. Something like the more advanced Eukaryotes these single celled creatures were unable to produce complex chemicals like steroids. (Credit: Sci.news)
With this new idea in mind paleochemists went searching for protosteroids in rocks of the right age and quickly hit the jackpot, they found protosteroids almost everywhere they looked. It is now thought that, during the time when the protosterol biota were dominant the true eukaryotes evolved in those harsh environments where crown steroids were needed in order to survive, perhaps on the land the researchers speculate. Then, about 800 million years ago, when the oxygen levels in the atmosphere increased to near present levels the true eukaryotes took over and the protosterol biota became extinct.
Paleochemist Jochen Brocks examines 1.6 billion year old rocks containing the chemical traces of the protosterol biota. (Credit: Reuters)
The evolution of complex eukaryotic cells from their prokaryotic ancestors was one of the most important advances in the history of life, setting the stage for the evolution of multicellular creatures. It is only reasonable therefore that the process should have taken place in stages. The protosterol biota seems to have been that intermediate step on the road to life as we know it today.
Everybody knows that much of archaeology is carried out in ancient burial sites, graveyards, tombs and etc. Part of the reason for this is that we humans have always had a tendency to try to take some of our Earthly possessions with us when we pass on to the world to come. The treasures found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun are the most famous examples of this but there are countless others. We’ve learned much about the technology of ancient societies by unearthing and examining the grave goods left behind by those people.
The tomb of Tutankhamun is probably the most famous archaeological site ever found. (Credit: BBC)
At the same time studying those olden gravesites can also reveal a great deal about the customs and rituals, the religious and ethical behaviour of the people who were buried there. In this post I will be discussing some recent discoveries made at two such burial sites, two locations not greatly separated in either space or time but which display considerable differences in terms of social changes.
Ritual behavior, such as receiving first communion, doesn’t leave any artifacts for archaeologists to discover later. (Credit: Our Sunday Visitor)Unless that is an artifact illustrating the ritual is deliberately created. (Credit: Diocese of Lansing)
The first site comes from an area near the German city of Munich where an excavation team searching for unexploded munitions left over from World War II happened upon two burials. Professional archaeologists were quickly called in and the entire site carefully exhumed. Perhaps the most interesting find was a sword that had been deliberately rendered useless by heating it in the middle of the blade and then folding it over. Other weapons found included a spearhead and a portion of a shield.
Unexploded munitions left buried in the ground from WW1 and WW2 are a real danger, several people are killed by them every year. (Credit: NDTV.com)
Some of the other grave goods found included a pair of scissors so well preserved that the archaeologists were tempted to use them along with a fibula or clasp and a chain belt. Based upon the items found the researchers think that the occupants of the graves were a man and a woman but they can’t be certain because these were cremation burials where the deceased were burned to ashes and the ashes then buried in a ceramic pot.
Scissors, a razor and folded sword are among the items discovered in the gravesite outside Munich. (Credit: Archaeology)
And that gives a clue as to what society these two people came from because the last culture in this part of Germany to practice cremation were the Celts, that’s pronounced ‘Kelts’ not ‘Selts’ by the way. The Celts were an Iron-Age, Indo-European people who spread across northern Europe from present day Turkey to Ireland and who fought both the Greeks and Romans for over 500 years. The grave goods found were also typical of the Celts; in fact not only was the sword definitely Celtic in design but the way in which it was folded has also been seen in other Celtic graves sites. The site has been dated to around 200-300 BCE and the grave goods sent to the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments where they will be cleaned, preserved and studied.
The Romans practiced both inhumation and cremation of their dead. Here is an illustration of the cremation of the Emperor Augustus. (Credit: ThoughtCo)Grave items from a Celtic burial in the Balkans, the ashes of the deceased were placed in the urn center top. Notice again the bent sword like the one discovered at the site outside Munich. (Credit: Balkan Celts – Word Press)
At the same time that the inhabitants of the graves in Germany lived other Celts were living in the British Islands and one of the biggest questions in archaeology today is just how different were the Celts in today’s Germany from those in today’s Britain. The fates of those groups were certainly very different however for in 43CE the Roman Emperor Claudius invaded Britain and conquered the lands that would become England and Whales. In the 400 years of Roman rule that followed many of the Celts living in Britain would become Romanized. Indeed it has been suggested by some historians that the only real difference between the Celts and the later Germanic tribes that destroyed the Roman Empire is that the Romans conquered the Celts but not the Germans.
Caractus, the leader of the Celtic Britains against the Romans is brought before the Emperor Claudius in Rome. (Credit: Historic UK)
Our second burial site comes from the late Roman period in Britain where more than 60 graves were found outside the town of Garforth near Leeds. The site must have been in use as a cemetery for a considerable length of time because it not only included late Roman burials but early Anglo-Saxon ones as well. The way the archaeologists could distinguish the two groups was that the graves of the Romanized Britains were oriented east-west in the Christian fashion while the Anglo-Saxons burials were aligned north-south. Of course carbon-14 dating also helped, yielding a time frame of 400-600 CE for the burials.
Two of the graves excavated in Garford, England. (Credit: BBC)
The fact that the remains unearthed in Garforth were skeletons, not cremated ashes was one big difference with the burial outside Munich. Another was the scarcity of grave goods in the Roman-Christian graves as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon burials, which often contained objects such as knives and pottery. However the most interesting find did come from one of the Roman-Christian burials where the deceased, a woman had been laid to rest in an impressive lead coffin. All the other coffins must have been made of wood for they had all decayed back into the soil.
Lead coffin used at Garford cematary. This burial must have been that of a person of high estate since a coffin like this would have been very expensive. (Credit: The Telegraph)
The site at Garforth was discovered, as many archaeological sites are in the UK, during the survey of the area for a possible housing development. The finds unearthed at Garforth, including the lead coffin are in the care of the West Yorkshire Archaeological Advisory Service, which will continue their analysis with the intent that some of the finds will one day be displayed at the Leeds City Museum.
Leeds City Museum in England. In the UK many cities and large towns have their own local museums where you can learn a lot about the local history and natural history. (Credit: Cool Places)
Many of our most important cultural practices and rituals involve how we as a society treat our dead. Because of that fact archaeologists can learn a lot about not only an ancient people’s technology but their beliefs as well by studying grave sites.
Astronomers are fascinated by variable stars, stars that can change their brightness whether it be over a timescale of months or days or in some cases as little as seconds. After all you’d think that an object that has a lifespan of millions if not billions of years shouldn’t change much over a single human lifetime, but many do. Some stars, like the Cepheid variables or eclipsing variables vary in a regular pattern and we can learn a great deal about the stars by observing that pattern. Other stars, like nova or supernova literally explode in a tremendous flash making them especially interesting to astronomers.
Brightness curve for a typical Cepheid variable star. By measured the time from peak brightness to peak brightness astronomers can determine the actual amount of energy the star produces. That allows them to calculate the distance to that star. (Credit: Physics Libre Texts)
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is a program run by Caltech University that uses the Samuel Oschin Telescope on Mount Palomar Observatory to scan the sky every night looking for any star that suddenly changes its brightness. Back in 2020 ZTF observed a dramatic increase in the brightness of a star that was designated as ZTF SLRN-2020, and which lies about 12,000 light years away in our own Milky Way. Over a ten day period the star had brightened over 100 times its normal brightness and remained brighter for 100 days before returning to normal.
With a mirror 48 inches in diameter the Samuel Oschin telescope is used to study variable stars. (Credit: The Planetary Society)
At that time Kishalay De was a graduate student working on his Ph.D. and was given the task of trying to understand what had happened to ZTF SLRN-2020. Doing a little checking De found that ZTF SLRN-2020 was a Sun-like star that was entering old age, meaning the star had used up its original hydrogen fuel and had begun to burn helium. When that happens to a star its core has to greatly increase in temperature and this causes its outermost layers to puff up, in astronomical terminology the star has passed from its main sequence to its red giant phase. De quickly determined that ZTF SLRN-2020 was not a repeating variable, nor was the increase in brightness great enough to be a nova or supernova explosion. Unable to figure it out, and very busy trying to finish his doctoral thesis De put the data on ZTF SLRN-2020 aside. It was only last year that now Dr. Kishalay De of MIT managed to get back to thinking about ZTF SLRN-2020.
Astronomer Kishalay De of MIT talking about his discovery of a star swallowing one of it’s planets. (Credit: Harvard Gazette, Harvard University)
The first thing Dr. De decided to do was to get more data about ZTF SLRN-2020 from other instruments at other wavelengths. One instrument in particular was NASA’s NEOWISE satellite that orbits the Earth scanning the sky in the infrared. Turned out that NEOWISE, which stands for Near Earth Object Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer, had in fact observed an increase in the brightness of ZTF SLRN-2020 fully nine months before ZTF had observed it in the visible wavelengths. More than that in the infrared ZTF SLRN-2020 was still slightly brighter than normal, two full years later. Such an increase in the infrared brightness indicates that something very close to the star is generating a huge amount of dust so that as the dust warms up it emits infrared.
Designed to search for asteroids and comets the NEOWISE Satellite can also be used to study variable stars. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Based on the data from both ZTF and NEOWISE Dr. De thinks he has the answer. As it grew larger in size ZTF SLRN-2020 has swallowed one of its planets, a planet about the size of Jupiter. According to Dr. De what happened to ZTF SLRN-2020 was this, as the outer surface of the star grew close to the planet the planet’s gravity pulled some of the star’s material away into space where it cooled becoming the dust that caused the initial increase in infrared brightness seen by NEOWISE. As the star continued to grow however it finally swallowed the planet itself causing the increase in brightness at optical wavelengths seen by ZTF. After swallowing the planet however there is still enough dust orbiting around the star to cause it to continue to glow in the infrared.
As stars run out of their hydrogen fuel they begin to burn helium. This causes their cores top become much hotter which in turn causes their outer surfaces to expand making the star hundreds if not thousands of times bigger. (Credit: Earth Sky)
If Dr. De’s analysis is correct then astronomers have observed for the first time something that they think must happen rather often in the Universe. After all, nearly every star will someday enter a red giant phase and if most stars have planets then a lot of planets must end up getting swallowed by their parent star.
In the long history of the Universe this must be a fairly common occurrence, a star swallowing one of its planets. (Credit: Physics – APS.org)
In fact that is quite possibly the eventual fate of our own planet Earth, don’t worry it won’t happen for about another five billion years or so. Still, like all stars someday the Sun will start to run out of its hydrogen fuel and as it starts to burn helium it will puff up to become a red giant just like ZTF SLRN-2020 is doing now. Based upon our observations of other stars with approximately the same mass as the Sun, including ZTF SLRN-2020, then the Sun will undoubtedly swallow first Mercury and then Venus. Whether or not the Earth gets swallowed or simply burnt to a crisp by a much larger, and hence much closer Sun is debatable, but in either case the conditions here on our planet will make life impossible.
Whether the Earth eventually gets swallowed or not, the Sun’s surface will come so close that our planet will be reduced to a burnt cinder. (Credit: EarthSky)
So is what happened to ZTF SLRN-2020 a preview of what’s going to happen someday here in our solar system. Only time will tell, and we all know that the Universe has plenty of that.
