Supernova in 1006
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> By December, it was again sighted in the constellation Di. The Chinese astrologer Zhou Keming, who was on his return to Kaifeng from his duty in Guangdong, interpreted the star to the emperor on May 30 as an auspicious star, yellow in color and brilliant in its brightness, that would bring great prosperity to the state over which it appeared. The reported color yellow should be taken with some suspicion, however, because Zhou may have chosen a favorable color for political reasons.
>SN 1006 lies well beyond 1 kiloparsec, and it did not appear to have significant effects on Earth. However, a signal of its outburst can be found in nitrate deposits in Antarctic ice.
Something from 7200 light years had an effect on Earth!
The funny thing is there's actually a TNG episode, New Ground, where the crew test a Soliton wave for warp propulsion.
"Another possible issue is that, although the Alcubierre metric is consistent with Einstein's equations, general relativity does not incorporate quantum mechanics. Some physicists have presented arguments to suggest that a theory of quantum gravity (which would incorporate both theories) would eliminate those solutions in general relativity that allow for backward time travel (see the chronology protection conjecture) and thus make the Alcubierre drive invalid."
My fun layman conjecture based on absolutely no credible knowledge of this area beyond reading articles like this is:
-- the universe has a forward direction of time & causality that is as unbreakable as exiting from a black hole is
-- in a black hole space & time are so warped they sort of switch roles - any direction you try to move in X,Y,Z only brings you closer to the singularity. In much the same way I think the outside universe operates in Time - no matter what you do, you move forward in time.
-- My somewhat unpleasant belief here is the reason you and everything in the universe can only move forward in Time is because of the Block universe[1] concept: all of X,Y,Z,T are already set & predetermined, so it makes no sense to actually try to change your path through it.
-- All of these things put together invalidate the concept of FTL travel, because FTL travel (even with a clever trick like warping spacetime) would violate causality & allow travelers to go back in time
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time...
> Enterprise is hailed by a trio of aliens, who warn that a deadly neutronic wavefront, many light years across, is approaching at a speed close to warp 7. Since the ship is capable of only warp 5 and cannot outrun the storm, everyone must shelter in order to survive the storm's radiation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catwalk
Also the plot speed radio of course:
> By transmission of a subspace radio signal, which travelled through subspace rather than normal space, subspace communication permitted the sending of data and messages across interstellar distances faster than the speed of light.
It's just basic warp theory :P
The graviton ellipse which consumed the Ares IV Mars orbiter in 2032 was in the Delta Quadrant by 2376. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Graviton_ellipse
Glad that this skepticism is noted, the evidence presented seems extremely dubious - I can't imagine the constellation Scorpio was recognized by indigenous in America of that time.
Because it seems trivial for a culture to identify a similar pattern of closely grouped stars they could use for navigation, correct? This is why I don't think I understand what you're saying.
I don't understand why people in this thread think is so unreasonable that a culture saw a new star in the sky 1/4 the brightness of the moon for 3 months, and somebody bothered to carve it on a rock.
I think that is reasonable. That is not the question.
The question is, would they have associated that part of the sky with a scorpion?
Stars on the sky are natural and people all around the world see them. But "constellations" are human made groupings. Their names, and even which stars are part of one constellation vs the other is culture dependent.
Your people might see an oxen carriage in one part of the sky, but if there is very little or no contact between our peoples mine might see a bear. And you might describe a particularly bright star as the yoke of the carriage, while my people would describe it as the feet of the bear pattern we see. Same stars, different patterns imagined into them, and different names for the pattern. Are you with me so far?
Now the problem is that the Hohokam petroglyph displays a scorpion. And scorpion is an animal which we in this day and age associate with the part of the sky where this supernova was. But did people of that age also see a scorpion when they looked up at that part of the sky?
Just as a concrete example read this part of the wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpius#Culture
"Javanese people of Indonesia call this constellation Banyakangrem ("the brooded swan") or Kalapa Doyong ("leaning coconut tree")[14] due to the shape similarity. In Hawaii, Scorpius is known as the demigod Maui's Fishhook"
In traditional Chinese naming the same area of the sky would be called "Heart", "Room" and "Tail" of the "Azure Dragon of the East": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpius_in_Chinese_astronomy
The question is not how much the stars physically drifted, but how much cultural recognition of star patterns have drifted.
A fun thing about star movement is that you can only see six stars in the Pleiades, but there are seven there. There are I guess a bunch of myths about there being seven of something and then one of them getting chased away. A fun theory is that right around when modern humans emerged, we made a nice story about that cluster of seven stars. Then as the stars moved so that two of them look like just one together, we independently made up stories of why there were only six left all around the world. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09170
This could be one of those things that's like "did you know Easter was a pagan godess" and it's total bullshit and actually only the Greeks have a six-were-once-seven myth. But maybe it's real and that's nice.
It's amazing how quickly your mind develops a map of what's there. Planets take on this odd motion/3d characteristic in your mind because they are very clearly moving against the backdrop. The orbital ecliptic of the planets become obvious and their mean flow towards the horizon reveals your latitude clearly and gives you this odd existential perspective on which you can visualize your latitude on Earth and its inherent spherical nature. You feel the spaceship we're on.
All of this with just stuff that you see every night.
A sudden bright light that is sixteen times brighter than Venus is going to catch everyone's attention. It's going to be unmistakable. People would have noticed the extra light cast on the ground and would have walked out of their homes to see what is going on. Everyone would have been talking about it.
That sounds wonderful.
> People would have noticed the extra light cast on the ground and would have walked out of their homes to see what is going on. Everyone would have been talking about it.
Absolutely. But that is not the question. The question is if the Hohokam petroglyph is depicting that phenomenon. And the evidence for that is simply weak. See more in this article: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/did-ancient-ameri...
Unless I'm missing something crucial, this seems pretty absurd and probably shouldn't be mentioned by the wiki page at all.
From the first wiki source here https://www.space.com/2458-ancient-rock-art-depicts-explodin...
>The Hohokam petroglyph depicts symbols of a scorpion and stars that match a model showing the relative positions of the supernova with respect to the constellation Scorpius.
Then here's the second source https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/did-ancient-ameri...
>"We have no reason to think prehistoric Indians of the American Southwest saw a scorpion in the stars of Scorpius," says Krupp. "In fact, in North America, the stars of Scorpius are imagined as various figures but not as a scorpion."
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9273-native-americans...
I'd be skeptical too
For astronomical research, it's easiest when events are dated using one calendar to correlate the observations across the whole planet. No matter which calendar specifically, it just must be uniform. For cultural research, it's more important to use a local calendar and e.g. see how the supernova was related to other culturally significant events.
Also, an article written in English is bound to use the Gregorian or Julian calendar which is familiar to the readers. An article written in Arabic, or Hebrew, or Tamil, or Malay may use the respective different calendars instead, as familiar to the readers.
Extrapolating from the only example I know, I wouldn't bet on it.
Before moving to Israel I knew that Rosh HaShanah (Hebrew New Year) is a public holiday and Gregorian New Year isn't, so I expected Hebrew calendar to be somewhat visible in everyday life or at least in official documents. Turns out, with the exception of holidays — to some surprise, including the decidedly secular Independence Day — it really isn't, everyone uses Gregorian.
Again, this a difference between astronomy and history points of view. In natural sciences, one would expect the now-universal units that originated in Western science: Julian calendar, SI units, times in UTC, etc. In historical and otherwise localized studies, I would expect a local / period-salient calendar, local units as reflected in the period's documents, etc. Converting these into exact modern dates and units is sometimes hard, and subject to a debate among historians.
But at current length? I think that detail would not be necessary and even kinda distracting in term of briefness. It's not really of great importance for the event itself anyway.
That is correct, but what would that help anyone in general (for any historic reporting)? We give dates on our agreed today's scale.. as we usually would also give other measurements like masses or lengths in our scale, unless explicitly given with other earlier units?
Even today in the news you will usually hear "an earthquake happened tonite at 2am in far away land" (and only eventually added, but then explicitly the local time).
Especially for this event I wonder, how many different calendars would you want to had mentioned to be satisfied? :)
The question is rather what are the error bars with these observations. When someone says "my car broke down last week" everyone understand that that is not a precise timestamp. On the other hand if you hear "according to the telemetry the crankshaft seized at 1696606533 unix timestamp." you know that they are talking about a very precise moment in time.
The problem comes if you take the first kind of description and convert it to a unix timestamp you imply precision where there was none found originally.
So when the wikipedia entry says "According to Songshi, the official history of the Song Dynasty (sections 56 and 461), the star seen on May 1, 1006, appeared to the south of constellation Di, between Lupus and Centaurus." Do they mean that Songshi wrote down the date according to his local convention which can be converted with a high confidence to our current date system as "May 1, 1006"? Or did they just erroneously implied more accuracy than what they have?
Outside of the Christian world, the correlations between different calendars and the Julian calendar is quite well-known, because by the time Europeans contacted people following those calendars, they can ask "what day is today" and get the Gregorian-Julian-local calendar correspondence. If you've got a stable year count (not based on reigning kings), it's easy to work out older dates. If you have regnal year numbering, and you have enough written evidence that you can decisively determine how long each king reigns for, then you can also carry that over to a complete calendrical determination.
In cases where the calendar is no longer used, you can match up calendars by looking for records corresponding to known (largely astronomical) phenomena (eclipses are particularly helpful) and get correlates that way. This is how we match the Mesoamerican Long Count to the Julian/Gregorian calendar.