GODS AND GODDESSES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD: Enki (Sumerian God Of Wisdom, Water, Magic, Creation And Chaos) 

New Impact Hypothesis Might Explain Our Moon’s Uniqueness

“This also helps explain some nice oddities all in one go. “What’s beautiful about this work is that we can end up with the current state of the moon — its orbit, its chemistry — with just one step, without invoking any other event,” says Sarah Stewart, a coauthor on the study. If the Earth rotated on its axis before the impact, and if the protoplanet that collided with Earth were in the Earth-Sun plane, none of this would be possible. But with this, we not only get a rapidly spinning young Earth and a 24-hour, 23.5º tilted Earth today, but a Moon that orbits out of the plane, nearly locked to the Sun rotationally, and locked to the Earth revolution-wise. The pieces all fall together beautifully.”

Why is our Moon so unlike every other moon in the Solar System? No other moon is such a large percent of its parent planet’s mass or size; no other moon rotates so far afield of its planet’s rotational axis; no other moon orbits so far out of the planet-Sun plane. Yet our Moon does it all. The giant impact hypothesis might explain why the Moon is made of the same material as Earth, but wouldn’t explain these features. Unless, that is, the giant impact occurred with a very large velocity out of the plane of proto-Earth’s orbit. Unless, again, the Earth weren’t rotating at 23.5º prior to the impact. This new tweak on the impact hypothesis, put forth by a team of authors earlier this week in the journal Nature, might explain the unique history of the Earth-Moon system, including some features we don’t normally think about as being puzzling.

It isn’t just Earth that’s unique in our Solar System, but the Moon as well. Combined, the great cosmic detective story might have a new lead suspect!

Anahita and Ishtar: Connections to the Planet Venus

Anahita was a goddess associated with water, fertility, wisdom, warfare, and eventually the planet Venus. During the Achaemenid dynasty in Persia, she became incorporated into the Zoroastrian religion as a Yazata, a type of minor divinity. Her association with warfare and the planet Venus was not very prominent before the Achaemenid Period, leading some to conclude that her cult and persona may have become influenced by the goddess Ishtar. In becoming associated with Ishtar, she may have taken on the characteristics of a Venus god/Venus goddess, a type of god which appears to occur across cultures associated with the planet Venus.  

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Patagonian fossil leaves reveal rapid recovery from dinosaur extinction event http://www.geologypage.com/2016/11/patagonian-fossil-leaves-reveal-rapid-recovery-dinosaur-extinction-event.html

Dun Aengus - prehistoric fort at the edge of an 100 meter high cliff. The first construction goes back to 1100 BC; around 500 BC, the triple wall defenses were probably built along the western side of fort. Ireland

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Ancient rocks hold evidence for life before oxygen http://www.geologypage.com/2016/11/ancient-rocks-hold-evidence-life-oxygen.html

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Egypto-Phoenician Silver Swivel Ring, C. 1000 BC

The thick solid silver shank tapering at the terminal and holding a solid silver scarab engraved with the falcon Horus in the center with the “Ames Scepter” and a protective Uraeus on either side, all standing on the Neb (Lord) sign.

page 590 of “Science and literature in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” (1878)

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!

Celestial nomad takes centre stage

In this new ESO image, nightfall raises the curtain on a theatrical display taking place in the cloudless skies over La Silla.

In a scene humming with activity, the major players captured here are Comet Lovejoy, glowing green in the centre of the image; the Pleiades above and to the right; and the California Nebula, providing some contrast in the form of a red arc of gas directly to the right of Lovejoy.

A meteor adds its own streak of light to the scene, seeming to plunge into the hazy pool of green light collecting along the horizon.

The telescopes of La Silla provide an audience for this celestial performance, and a thin shroud of low altitude cloud clings to the plain below the observatory streaked by the Panamericana Highway.

Comet Lovejoy’s long tail is being pushed away from the comet by the solar wind. Carbon compounds that have been excited by ultraviolet radiation from the Sun give it its striking green hue.

This is the first time the comet has passed through the inner Solar System and ignited so spectacularly in over 11 000 years. Its highly elliptical orbit about the Sun — adjusted slightly due to meddling planets — means that it will not grace our skies for another 8000 years once it has rounded the Sun and begun its lonely voyage back into the cold outer regions of the Solar System.

Image credit: P. Horálek/ESO