The Boatyard At Saint Mammes By Alfred Sisley

Pulsars: How The First ‘False Alien’ Signal Opened Up A New World In Astronomy

“In 1967, a radio source emitting regular, 0.04-second long pulses every 1.3373 seconds was found for the first time using a scintillation array. After the “noise” explanation was ruled out, the next thing people turned towards were intelligent extraterrestrials. There was no natural mechanism in existence that would have explained it at that time, so turning to aliens was logical, if ultimately incorrect.”

Observations that surprise us, of a phenomenon we weren’t expecting and don’t have an explanation for, are some of the most exciting things we can encounter in astronomy. In 1967, regularly pulsing radio sources, discovered without any expectation, provided exactly that. It wasn’t noise; it was definitely a robust, repeatable observation; so what was it? While our imaginations might have run to aliens initially, further developments quickly showed that this was a ball of rapidly rotating neutrons, more massive than even the Sun but only a few kilometers in diameter. These pulsars, as they’re now know, are ubiquitous and come about from the corpses of core-collapse supernova. Could this be a harbinger of what we can expect from the ‘alien megastructure’ controversy?

Come find out how the first ‘false alien’ signal from astronomy opened up a whole new field of science for us to investigate!

X

The eight planets of our solar system image credits: [x]

Интересно

The Only Library Ever Recovered from Antiquity: The 1800 Scrolls of Herculaneum

The Villa of the Papyri is the name given to a private house that was uncovered in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. This city, along with nearby Pompeii, is perhaps best remembered for its destruction during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. When the villa was rediscovered, archaeologists were lucky to discover a library of 1800 scrolls. This is the only known library to have survived from the Classical world.

Read more…

😊

Archaeologists Discover Unknown Fortress Walls, Byzantine Gold Coin

Two unknown fortress walls and three unknown fortress towers as well as a 14th century Byzantine gold coin have been discovered by archaeologists during the 2016 excavations of the major medieval fortress of Rusocastro in today’s Southeast Bulgaria.

The Rusocastro Fortress is best known for the Battle of Rusocastro in 1332 AD. It was the last big military victory of the medieval Bulgarian Empire before it was conquered by the invading Ottoman Turks at the end of the 14th century.

It was also the last major battle of the seven-century-long Bulgarian-Byzantine Wars for domination of the Balkan Peninsula (lasting from the 7th until the 14th century), which ended when, weakened by their hostilities against one another, among other factors, Bulgaria and Byzantium were both conquered by the Ottoman Turkish invaders at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century. Read more.

The Pork Butcher by Camille Pissarro

Size: 66x54 cm Medium: oil on canvas

😆

Four Dancers by Edgar Degas

Medium: pastel

Ивтересно

PEOPLE OF THE ANCIENT WORLD: Lucius Verus (Marcus Aurelius’ Co-Emperor) 

LUCIUS Verus (161-169 CE) was Marcus Aurelius’ adopted brother and co-emperor, a man whose time on the throne is overshadowed by the reign of the last of the Five Good Emperors.

 In the final years of the Pax Romana, a period of almost two centuries of relative peace and stability following the rule of Augustus, a young Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, came to the throne in 161 CE, and for the first time in the empire’s short history he chose to have someone rule at his side; his adopted brother Lucius Verus.

The future emperor Lucius Ceionius Commodus was born in 130 CE and raised in Rome, the eldest son of the one-time consul Lucius Aelius Caesar.

Read More 

Article by Donald L. Wasson on AHE

Ancient Buddha statue emerges in E. China reservoir

Archaeologists have started an underwater detection project after villagers in eastern China’s Jiangxi Province found the head of a Buddha statue emerging from the surface of a local reservoir.

The head was spotted at Hongmen Reservoir, Nancheng County in the city of Fuzhou, at the end of last year when a hydropower gate renovation project lowered water levels in the reservoir by more than 10 meters.

Judging from the head design, the statue was carved during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), said Xu Changqing, head of the provincial research institute of archaeology.

He said that the researchers had also found rectangular holes carved on the cliff, obvious marks of architecture, which meant that a temple could have existed there. Read more.

Lightweight Black Hole

Yerres, Path Through the Old Growth Woods in the Park via Gustave Caillebotte

Size: 43x31 cm Medium: oil on canvas