Topic: News and Current Events

[Yeshu]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvm94/scientists-have-seen-light-from-the-far-side-of-a-black-hole-for-the-first-time

For the first time ever, scientists have glimpsed “echoes” of light from the far side of a black hole, revealing an unprecedented glimpse of the environment behind these extreme objects relative to our perspective on Earth.

It’s well-known that no light escapes from a black hole, but the mind-boggling discovery of light coming from behind one confirms a key prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which states that photons can be bent around black holes due to their intense gravitational forces, which warp spacetime and anything in it, including light.

A team led by Dan Wilkins, an astrophysicist at Stanford University’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics & Cosmology, spotted these never-before-seen “X-ray echoes” around a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called I Zwicky 1, which is located about 800 million light years from Earth, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

[Yeshu]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkd57k/scientists-have-unlocked-the-secrets-of-the-ancient-antikythera-mechanism

Known as the Antikythera Mechanism, the object is a highly sophisticated astronomical calculator that dates back more than 2,000 years. Since its recovery from the shipwreck in 1901, generations of researchers have marveled over its stunning complexity and inscrutable workings, earning it a reputation as the world’s first known analog computer.

The device’s gears and displays cumulatively demonstrated the motions of the planets and the Sun, the phases of the lunar calendar, the position of Zodiac constellations, and even the timing of athletic events such as the ancient Olympic Games. The device also reflects a very ancient idea of the cosmos, with Earth at the center.

While some of the calculator’s mysteries have been solved over the past century, scientists at University College London’s Antikythera Research Team present, for the first time, “a radical new model that matches all the data and culminates in an elegant display of the ancient Greek Cosmos,” according to a study published on Friday in Scientific Reports.

Led by Tony Freeth, a mechanical engineer at UCL and a leading world expert on the mechanism, the interdisciplinary team called the artifact “an ancient Greek astronomical compendium of staggering ambition” and “a beautiful conception, translated by superb engineering into a device of genius,” in the study. 

“This is such a special device,” said Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL and a co-author of the study, in a call. “It’s just so out-of-this world, given what we know, or knew, about contemporary ancient Greek technology. It's unique and there's nothing else that remotely approaches it for centuries, or maybe a millennia afterwards.”

“However, it exists and all the scholarship points to the fact that it is ancient Greek,” added Wojcik, who has been fascinated by the artifact since he was a child. “There's no question about it and we just have to accept that there is so much about what they could do that we just don't know and we can't fathom. The mechanism is a window on that.”

[Yeshu]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cave-paintings-may-be-among-indias-oldest-180978324/

Archaeologists say cave paintings found in northwestern India’s Aravalli mountain range may have been made more than 20,000 years ago. As Shubhangi Misra reports for the Print, the area where the art is located, in the state of Haryana, is also home to much older tools and tool-making equipment dated to as long as 100,000 years ago.

Banani Bhattacharya, deputy director of the Haryana Department of Archaeology and Museums, tells the Print that experts have found at least 28 ancient sites in Haryana to date. Some trace their roots to the time of the Harappan—or Indus Valley—civilization, which began around 2500 B.C.E., while others are much older. Drawing on the long history of settlement in the area, archaeologists have been able to trace both the development of tool-making and the emergence of art.

“Some are line drawings, which are the oldest, when humans hadn’t really figured out how to draw complex patterns,” Bhattaharya says. “Then we can see drawings of different geometric shapes, foliage, animals and human figures. We’ve found some symbols that look like cup marks, which had presumably been kept for some special purpose.”

[Yeshu]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/discovery-secret-tunnel-mexico-solve-mysteries-teotihuacan-180959070/

In designing Teotihuacán (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN), the city’s architects had arranged the major monuments on a north-south axis, with the so-called “Avenue of the Dead” linking the largest structure, the Temple of the Sun, with the Ciudadela, the southeasterly courtyard that housed the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. Gómez knew that archaeologists had previously discovered a narrow tunnel underneath the Temple of the Sun. He theorized that he was now looking at a kind of mirror tunnel, leading to a subterranean chamber beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. If he was correct, it would be a find of stunning proportions—the type of achievement that can make a career.

Fifty feet in, we stopped at a small inlet carved into the wall. Not long before, Gómez and his colleagues had discovered traces of mercury in the tunnel, which Gómez believed served as symbolic representations of water, as well as the mineral pyrite, which was embedded in the rock by hand. In semi-darkness, Gómez explained, the shards of pyrite emit a throbbing, metallic glow. To demonstrate, he unscrewed the nearest light bulb. The pyrite came to life, like a distant galaxy.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/30/4285858/strange-metal-like-spheres-found-mexico-teotihuacan-temple

Hundreds of strange metallic-looking spheres of unknown origin and purpose have been discovered by archaeologists exploring the ruins of an ancient Mesoamerican temple in Mexico, Discovery News reports. The spheres were uncovered by a camera-equipped robotic exploration rover on the floor of two previously sealed underground chambers in the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in the ancient city Teotihuacan, 30 miles away from Mexico City. They are thought to be at least 1,800 years old and are about 1.5 inches to 5 inches in size. Their cores are made up of clay and other unknown organic materials, while their surfaces are covered in pyrite, also known as "fool's gold," giving them a sparkling yellow coating.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4384j/a-secret-pyramid-was-found-inside-an-ancient-temple-in-mexico

The ancient Temple of Kukulkan, dedicated to its namesake—the feathered serpent god K'uk'ulkan, or Quetzalcoatl—has been slowly revealing its secrets for more than a century.

During excavations in the 1930s, a second, hidden pyramid containing an embellished red jaguar-shaped throne was discovered inside of the structure. Years later, in 2015, it was revealed that an enormous underground cavern, or "cenote," lead to a subterranean river system beneath Kukulkan, and possibly held sacred significance to the early Mayans who worshipped there.

Now, archaeologists believe they've found the temple's original structure: another smaller pyramid "encapsulated underneath the visible temple" that was built somewhere between 500 and 800 CE, according to the Associated Press.

[Yeshu]

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-star-of-bethlehem-can-science-explain-what-it-really-was

On December 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will come together in a “Great Conjunction” unlike any seen in nearly 800 years. The two planets will appear so close together in Earth’s night sky on winter solstice that they’ll almost look like a single object.

That’s prompted some to dub the sight a "Christmas Star," and others to wonder about a similar sounding celestial event that coincided with the biblical first Christmas: the Star of Bethlehem. But did such a cosmic sight ever really exist? And if so, what does astronomical science tell us about what could have caused it?

When you rewind the motion of the planets — something that’s easy to do with observing software these days — you can see that several interesting conjunctions played out in the years around the life of Jesus. (A planetary conjunction happens when two planets make a close approach to each other in Earth’s night sky. The two objects aren’t actually near each other, though, they just look that way from our vantage point.)

In the year 7 B.C., Jupiter and Saturn had three conjunctions in the same constellation, Pisces.

[Yeshu]

https://sinchi-foundation.com/news/dreamtracking-pleiades-worlds-oldest-civilization/

Take the Star Dreaming Story of the Seven Sisters as an example. This story is one of the widest distributed amongst ancient songlines of Australia, tracking over half of the continent from the Central Desert up until the west coast. Observed from central Australia, the Pleiades star group rises above the horizon soon after sunset and keeps a low trajectory. Perhaps for this reason, such a small star group was given such significance, as it appears to launch from the earths’ surface right above the land. However, in many ancient traditions, the mythological story of the Pleiades was narrated through the journey of 7 beautiful sisters, each representing one of the constellations’ stars. Similar stories of 7 sisters were told in ancient Greece, the Americas and Siberia.

In the Seven Sisters story of Aboriginal Australia, the group of stars are Napaljarri sisters being chased across land and sky by Jukurra-Jukurra (the morning star), a Jakamarra man in love with the seven sisters, specifically fixated on the oldest sister. When on Martu country, where the seven sisters take humanoid form and live on the ground, they’re known as Minyipuru. As they travel further east and decide to fly through the sky to escape their lustful pursuer (and at times avoid country belonging to others), they switch languages and become known as the Kungkarangkalpa. New and gripping episodes in this lengthy saga come into being as the pursuit, escape and journey unfold. Like all Aboriginal creator beings, the man has the capacity to shift shape, transforming himself to lure his ‘prey’ into coming closer to him.

[Yeshu]

https://www.harappa.com/script/parpola12.html

In the Indus script, numerals are marked by repeating a short vertical stroke the required number of times. The pictograms of 'six' (six short strokes divided to two lines) and (on its left side) 'fish' together form a syntactic unit (Fig. 13f). It corresponds to the compound aru-meen 'six-star' occurring in Old Tamil texts and denoting the asterism of the Pleiades. This constellation was the first one in the ancient Indian star calendar whose conjunction with the sun at the vernal equinox marked the new year around the 23rd century B.C.

The Pleiades hold a prominent place as the mothers or wet nurses of the newborn infant in one of the most ancient and central Hindu myths, that of the birth of the war-god Rudra/Skanda, who evidently represents, among other things, the victorious rising sun (and as vernal sun the new year). The Pleiades are said to have been the wives of the seven sages, who are identified with the seven stars of the Great Bear.

The Great Bear's Old Tamil name elu-meen 'seven-star' corresponds to the combination of the pictograms '7' + 'fish', which alone constitutes the entire text of one finely carved Indus seal (Fig. 21).

[Yeshu]

http://www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/astronomer-discovers-tunnel-like-structure-may-surround-earth/

“If we were to look up in the sky we would see this tunnel-like structure in just about every direction we looked – that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light,” West said in the press release. She and her team have published a paper of their findings in Science. “Magnetic fields don’t exist in isolation. They all must connect to each other,” West said in the release. “So a next step is to better understand how this local magnetic field connects both to the larger-scale galactic magnetic field, and also to the smaller scale magnetic fields of our Sun and Earth.”

[Yeshu]

https://www.universetoday.com/151553/the-largest-rotating-objects-in-the-universe-galactic-filaments-hundreds-of-millions-of-light-years-long/

We’ve known for a while about the large-scale structure of the Universe. Galaxies reside in filaments hundreds of millions of light-years long, on a backbone of dark matter. And, where those filaments meet, there are galaxy clusters. Between them are massive voids, where galaxies are sparse. Now a team of astronomers in Germany and their colleagues in China and Estonia have made an intriguing discovery.

These massive filaments are rotating, and this kind of rotation on such a massive scale has never been seen before.

Obviously, there’s no way to take an actual picture of the Universe’s large-scale structure. But there are some almost-famous images that come from the Millennium Simulation Program. The Millennium Simulation was a super-computer simulation of a cubic portion of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on each side. The image contains about 20 million individual galaxies organized in filaments and clumps, and it was our first real glimpse of the Universe’s LSS.

It’s remarkable to look at that image now and imagine those filaments rotating.

[Yeshu]

https://www.businessinsider.com/mystery-radio-waves-unknown-object-milky-way-center-2021-10

Mysterious radio waves are emanating from the heart of our galaxy, and astronomers don't know what's making them.

All celestial objects emit radio waves — planets, stars, dead stars, and even asteroids. But researchers at the University of Sydney recently detected radio signals that do not match any known types. The waves, originating near the center of the Milky Way, don't seem to be coming from any kind of star, planet, or space rock that scientists have seen before.

Even stranger, the strength of this signal has waxed and waned dramatically over just a few months. Most objects in the galaxy, by contrast, don't change much year to year — and therefore nor do their radio waves.

"The signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it," Ziteng Wang, the lead author of the new study and a PhD student in physics at the University of Sydney, said in a press release.

A paper describing the discovery was published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journals. In it, Wang and his coauthors concluded that the mysterious source of this radio signal "may represent part of a new class of objects."

[Yeshu]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/crusades-sword-israeli-scuba-diver-mediterranean-sea/

An Israeli amateur diver found a large, 900-year-old sword dating back to the Crusades at the bottom of Mediterranean Sea last week, Israeli researchers said on Monday.

The diver, identified as Shlomi Katzin from Atlit, Israel, discovered the weapon on Saturday among other artifacts on the Mediterranean seabed, including ancient stone anchors, other anchors made of metal, and pottery fragments, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The sword has a blade over 39 inches long and a hilt measuring nearly 12 inches, and it likely once belonged to a crusading knight.

Katzin brought the sword ashore after fearing it could be further buried under the sea's shifting sands. He then reported his find to the IAA and was given a certificate of appreciation for "good citizenship," an IAA spokesperson said.

[Yeshu]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-ever-crusader-encampment-unearthed-in-israel-180978896/

Now, archaeologists say they’ve located remnants of that Crusader camp—the first of its kind ever unearthed in the Middle East. As the Jerusalem Post’s Rossella Tercatin reports, the researchers also found a trove of artifacts that shows how Christian armies lived while they were in the field.

Published in the book Settlement and Crusade in the Thirteenth Century, the new findings shed light on the medieval encampment, which was discovered at the Zippori springs in Galilee during expansion of a local highway.

[Yeshu]

https://www.businessinsider.com/fast-flowing-molten-iron-river-in-earths-core-2016-12

Deep underground, there is a massive river of molten iron flowing around the Earth's core. It's moving westward under Alaska and Siberia and it's speeding up.

The river lies 3,000 kilometres beneath the surface of Earth. It's 420 km wide and 7,000 km long and probably stretches around 5,000 km downwards. It's also nearly as hot as the surface as the sun, according to the results published in the journal Nature Geoscience by scientists from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), who used data from the European Swarm satellites to find the river.

Satellites like these detect changes in the Earth's magnetic field, which is controlled by the liquid iron and nickel churning around in the Earth’s core. By measuring fluctuations in the magnetic field to very high accuracy, the team was able to detect the molten river, which they refer to as the "jet-stream."

They compare it to atmospheric jet streams, which are fast flowing, narrow air currents that sweep across the Earth at high altitudes in a meandering shape. The molten river works similarly but under the ground.

The molten jet stream has sped up recently, according to the researchers. It's speed has tripled in the last 15 years. Exactly what drives the motion and these changes is unknown so far, but the team thinks that it's probably triggered by changes in the magnetic field within the core.

[Yeshu]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oldest-known-mayan-calendar-found-inside-guatemalan-pyramid-180979933/

The fragments examined in the study display a “mature” artistic and writing ability, suggesting that the calendar system had been used even earlier than previously thought.

Retired Longwood University emeritus anthropologist and geographer Walter Witschey, who was not involved in the research, tells LiveScience’s Laura Geggel that the research is “meticulously done” and that the dating is “evidence for the earliest known calendar notation” from the region.

The Maya also developed a writing system which consists of 800 glyphs, with the earliest example also found in San Bartolo, reports Sam Hancock for the Independent. Heather Hurst, one of the paper’s co-authors and anthropology professor at Skidmore College, told the Independent about 7,000 mural fragments of varying sizes have also been found in this site, amounting to a “giant jigsaw puzzle.”

[Yeshu]

https://news.abplive.com/science/3400-year-old-city-emerges-from-mosul-reservoir-on-tigris-river-archaeologists-study-1535021

An international team of researchers have found a 3,400-year-old Mitanni Empire-era city which was once located in Iraq's Tigris River. The Mitanni was an Indo-Iranian empire centred in northern Mesopotamia which flourished from about 1500 to 1350 BC. The city emerged from the waters of the Mosul reservoir early this year as water levels fell rapidly due to extreme drought in Iraq.

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/kemune-palace-07345.html