Requiem for Relativity

Thinking about this a it more, there' no way that I can accept that ancient peoples could ever have seen this thing. A twentieth mag star suddenly brightens by fourteen magnitudes. That's just to make it visible to the naked eye. For it to have been noticeable it had to have brightened much more than that. That is an explosive event, alternatively, if it were a sustained event, covering a few hundred years then we have a problem of by what mechanism could it do it. There are thousands of brown dwarfs within a few hundred light years of us, statistically we should have seen at least one sudden flare up, unless such events are extremely rare.

I honestly think you are in great danger of shooting yourself in the foot over this line of reasoning. Astronomers can afford to wait, they could well wait until you had popped your clogs. They might well argue that they don't much want to share a press conference with someone that might launch into a lecture on the secret wisdom of the ancients. They are not knaves, they will give you the credit for the discovery, it's just that it will be a posthumous one.

A bit more thought about this. A brown dwarf radiates very quickly, it's atmosphere is at about 2500 K and as it's temperature drops it turns into a methane rich atmosphere. at about 1500 K

Let's suppose it does this explosively, then the magnitude increase would be down largely to reflected Sol light. This would scare the hell out of me, let alone ancient peoples. We would have a few months of a rather baleful bright star of a magenta hue. The eye of Mordor anyone []

Brown dwarfs in our near neighbourhood could go unnoticed unless they have a star that can shine off the expanded envelope.

This still means that it's best to put the ancient wisdom argument onto the back burner. I'd put the emphasis on Tom's notion of exploding planets being mistaken for supernova but think of this in terms of brown dwarfs.

(Edited) How's about we stick in some ball park figures and see if we can come up with the mass that needs to be ejected from what amounts to a mini red giant phase. Somewhere between a Sirius and a Venus I would think. A daylight magenta Venus like object would be talked about for generations. They still talk about Alexander the great in the middle east as if he walked about yesterday. A global blood gem in the sky myth sounds good to me.

(email to journalist, 1 hr. ago, ~11AM CDT 4/10/09)

Hi *******!

Archaeoastronomical and modern astronomical evidence says something really will happen on 2012. Four online sky surveys show a transient object on a 6340 yr orbit (the object itself never would come near Earth). This orbital period correlates with geologic & climate changes approx. 6300 (El Nino) & 12700 (Younger Dryas) yrs ago.

So far, I haven't been able to recruit any telescopes bigger than 17 in, in the effort to confirm, and the results are equivocal due to noise and faint images (the object has "Red" colorimetric magnitude approx. +19 on red filter sky surveys, and isn't visible on blue filter surveys; likely, it's gravitationally collapsed). According to the idea of Paul Wesson, the *known* solar system's angular momentum is abnormally low. Urbain LeVerrier, David Todd, Percival Lowell, Wallace Eckert, Robert Harrington and many other great astronomers have believed that orbital data show perturbations compatible with such a distant, massive planet.

The Maya didn't know about precession of the equinoxes, so couldn't have predicted the solstice, to the day, at Dec. 21, 2012 (1500 yr in their future). Greek astronomers (e.g. Aristarchus) might have been able, in the 3rd century BC or earlier (Ptolemy wasn't accurate enough, but his method easily could have been "accurized" in Hellenistic scientific literature among the 90% of Classical literature now lost).

My discovery (Lowell's "Planet X", which I've named "Barbarossa" from the prologue to a novel by Berry Fleming) might flare up periodically at the times of its effects on the inner Solar System. If so, Egyptians would have identified it with Horus, in the constellation Crater, which they seem to have identified with Hathor's horns (Hathor = hwt Hor = house of Horus; the rising Crater looks like the peaked house Egyptians would have had before desertification). Many Egyptian temple foundations inexplicably align with the rising or setting of a star at the declination Barbarossa would have had then.

Sincerely,
Joseph C. Keller, M. D. (B.A., Harvard, 1977)

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Stoat</i>
<br />...They still talk about Alexander...as if he walked about yesterday. ...
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Thanks for these posts, and for your link to the article about the 2005 discovery of planet-forming dust rings around brown dwarfs! Regarding your idea about observing brightened Barbarossas circling other stars:

Above, my most generous estimate (based on physics and archaeoastronomy) for Barbarossa's periodic or quasi-periodic brightening, if powered by gravitational infall, was apparent magnitude -6. A Barbarossa 220 AU from Alpha Centauri would give almost 3' separation as seen from Earth. A generous estimate of its apparent magnitude when brightened, would be -6 + 15.5 = +9.5.

The gravitational wobble would be ~2 AU (for an 0.02 solar mass Barbarossa, circling 200 AU from the alpha-Centauri binary's ~2 solar masses); this is ~2", but for a 4000 yr period, the maximum possible proper motion caused, would be only 3 milliarcsec/yr, and the maximum possible time derivative of proper motion, only 5 microarcsec/yr^2. This would tend to be obscured by the error attending measurement of the AB binary orbit. Because of their moderate mass and great distance from the primary, gravitational wobble isn't the best way to detect Barbarossas.

For the 30 yr between the major photographic plate sky surveys, let's guess 30/6000 = 0.5% of Barbarossas brightened. The nearest of these brighteners likely would be very roughly 4.4 * cuberoot(200) = 26 lt yr away; a generous apparent brightness estimate then would be +13.5; sky surveys clearly would show stars as much as 6 mags dimmer than this, i.e., corresponding to our own Barbarossa having mag 0.0 as seen from Earth.

Let's all work together on this: are there sunlike (Type G V) stars nearer than 100 lt yr (30 pc, i.e. 30 mas Hipparcos parallax) having a nova within, say, 6'? Mindful that Barbarossa appears on Red but not Blue sky surveys, one could compare the 1950s Palomar Red survey to two Red plates from the 1980s. The object sought would be on both 1980s plates but not the 1950s plate. The images available online, 15x15', are near optimum size for the nearest stars, but for efficiency could be cut down to W x W', where W = 15' / (distance in parsec). The 1950s plate is slightly less sensitive, so one would need to verify that stars as dim or slightly dimmer than the nova, reliably were detected by it.

Hi Joe, I did a google search for "maya 2012" and read a few of the hits for it. Not good at all! under the unwritten rules of guilt by association, there's no way that anybody with access to a large telescope is going to go anyway near the Mayan connection.

I then did a search for data on the crab supernova. Everybody must have seen it but people in Europe looked the other way. Though the brighter 1006 C.E. nova was remarked on. The smart money is on, that the Christian church was going through a major schism at the time of the crab nova, and it was thought politic not to comment on the guest star in the heavens. The Mayan culture must have had a view on this, if only because Venus was important to them, and the crab outshone Venus. Yet anything they wrote down must have been destroyed by Christian zealots.

If a brown dwarf in our solar system brightened by 25 magnitudes, then its luminosity goes up 10 billionfold. It has to increase its surface area, cool and create a lot of methane, puppy fat for a body with such a surface area to volume ratio. That has to be an explosion, and the body will lose mass. Billions of tonnes but still rather small beer.

My ball park figure is that the disk will expand to about 4 a.u. in diameter, I think that's way too big. It simply has to be much dimmer but still could be just visible in daylight. It would be hugely impressive to see, because it wouldn't be a point light source but would have a disk.

Still, I think you should drop the Mayan stuff like a hot potato. Why ally yourself to a bunch of "end of days" slightly cranky eccentrics? Even the most open minded of scientists will simply shrug and say, wait until 2012 then, put a bet on nothing horrible happening.

(Edited) Oops [] I worked that out for the radius and not the diameter, so that would mean about 8 a.u. Trouble is we just don't know enough about brown dwarfs, or at least I don't [)][8D]

I took a look at the 1054 crab explosion in starry night back yard and it would have been very impressive, as it would have appeared just under the new moon in July. If early watchers of the sky, were aware of periodic brightening of Joe's star, then they would have been bemused by the supernova events of the eleventh century. They'd be in the wrong place and would have to be commented on vis a vis Joe's star. Destroyed, lost or sitting in some museum misunderstood, it's anybodies guess.