Arquivo para a ‘Astronomia’ Categoria
Annular eclipse: historical and mystical data
10
Oct
On October 14th, an annular eclipse should
take place, one in which the moon leaves a small ring with southern light and settles in the center of the king star, and which has curious historical and mystical data.
The first historically narrated eclipse, by Herodotus, describes the battle of the Medes and Lydians (590-585 BC) which ended with an agreement after they realized that the day turned into night and in their understanding the darkness should cease for peace, Herodotus describes it like this:
“In the sixth year of the war, a battle took place, and when the fighting had begun, suddenly the day turned into night. (…) The Lydians and the Medes, when they saw that the night had replaced the day, ceased their fight, anxious for peace to be established between them.” Herodotus (1.74).
Before calculating the date of the eclipse, it was believed that the battle would have been fought on September 30, 610 BC (according to William Smith’s Dictionary of the Greeks and Romans), but modern astronomical calculations have established the date as May 28 from 585 BC
The second data was established with the help of the biblical reading of the battles in Israel of Ajailon and Gibeon, which helped, according to the BBC, to reveal the date of an even earlier eclipse, at the time of the retaking of Israel by the Jews returning from Egyptian exile. , the reading that helped reveal this date, also known as Joshua’s prayer, is this (Joshua 10:12-14): “Sun, stand over Gibeon, and you, Moon, over the Valley of Aijalon”.
The BBC report, physicist Colin Humphreys, director of research at the University of Cambridge in England, and astrophysicist Graeme Waddington using this passage calculated the date of the annular eclipse and found October 30, 1207 BC.
The report also mentions that the first person to suggest such a date was the linguist Robert Wilson (1918) and that he even suggests a re-reading of the biblical text:
‘Eclipse, O Sun, in Gibeon,
And the Moon in the Valley of Aijalom´.
Since today we know that there will be a band where the eclipse is total (image) and bands next to it where the eclipse gives a partial shadow.
Heródoto, Histórias, Livro I, Clio, 74.
Seeing far and blinding near
11
Jul
Recently James Webb’s special observatory
saw the most distant galaxy that man can ever observe, the galaxy called JADES-GS-Z13-0 (photo) is approximately 320 million years from the Big Bang, which for us is a great measure, for a universe of 13.5 billion years old means relatively a few seconds after the Big Bang (one of the theories of the formation of the universe).
On the other hand, we are witnessing an increasingly unstable, unfair, ruthless and dangerous world, and with a catastrophic nuclear danger close at hand, it seems that a good part of humanity treats everything as if it were normality, not caring much about the fate of the planet. and the civilizing process that is not stagnant, but regressing in frightening steps.
The strangeness of this discovery of the universe is at the same time that we find amounts of Carbon and Oxygen in these bodies, the same James Web discovered a little later that six more galaxies (Jades was discovered with another three “near”), which were very massive where bodies smaller than those found there were expected at the beginning of the Universe.
The discovery showed that they have masses of approximately 100 million solar masses, while the normal would be for younger galaxies smaller masses, our Milky Way for example “older” has a mass of 1.5 trillion solar masses.
Furthermore it is a nursery of stars, about three suns are born there every year, and their masses are poor in metals of chemical substances heavier than helium and hydrogen (remember that they are at the top of the chemical periodic table on the left and right ).
If this restores humility to the knowledge we have of the universe, the same does not happen with social scientists, anthropologists and paleontologists, who the more they discover about our origin on the planet, for example that Neanderthals and homo sapiens coexisted and even crossed paths creating a diverse humanity, little tolerant we are with races and cultures.
And intolerance means less peace, more dangers and now we don’t have stones, axes and bows, we have nuclear weapons and dangerous atomic power plants that are subject not only to human limits, but also to natural and geological ones.
The geosphere and biosphere depend today as never before in the history of the noosphere and on what we cultivate as a civilizing culture and as a vision of other cultures and races.
Cosmogony, cosmology and eschatology
04
Jul
We have already developed here the
idea of Kosmos in Greek philosophy, which is a time that designates the entire universe as a whole, but it is also “order”, “beauty” and “harmony” for the Greeks, now with powerful telescopes such as the Hubble and James Webb we know that there is also chaos and disharmony in the universe, but the deeper question remains: how did it all begin?
Cosmogonies are a body of doctrines, from religious and mythical principles to scientific ones that seek to explain the order and principle of the universe in its cosmogenesis.
As man became more sedentary, he tried to better adapt to nature to satisfy the needs of animals and plants, needing to look at the sky and understand the seasons to better control crops and pastures for animals.
Practically all civilizations (or civilizational eras) elaborated their cosmogonies, for example, in Western civilization the geocentric model of Ptolemy (the earth is the center), passed to the Copernican model (the heliocentric model), now with the power of James Webb we are looking at the first galaxies and this is possible because the light reaching us has already traveled several light years, so we are seeing a picture of the past.
Thus, our vision of cosmogenesis is gradually changing, at the moment, for example, the telescope that works with a different spectrum of light, the infrared, managed to spot a galaxy 400 million years after the big bang (if this theory is right), which means 13.5 billion years ago (photo), that is, we are seeing almost our cosmogenesis.
Cosmology is then increasingly closer to cosmogesis and this would mean a vision of both, but the essential questions are still missing: where did we come from and where are we going?
Thus, an eschatological vision, beginning and end, is lacking, and one question is already certain, although the planet could collapse and with it our civilization, due to the action of an external cataclysm or a destruction of human artifacts: a war, the very danger of there are so many nuclear power plants on the planet, remember the incident of Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl, the planet now has 440 active and 23 under construction, in addition to the military arsenal in several countries.
In the midst of the stormy wind of our time, Christian cosmogony takes shelter and waits in the divine presence of that reading that says (Mt 8:27): “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” when the apostles wake him up on the boat because of the weather and the rough ocean.
The question of the consciousness of Being
04
May
Thanks to the new and surprising advancement of deep intelligence machines
(deep learning), the issue of consciousness, which was already thought of in philosophy, now spreads across all areas of thought, and what we dealt with in previous posts also dealt with this.
Now it is a matter of deciding whether it is possible to think of consciousness only as something logical and instrumental, so the machine, through deep and elaborate algorithms in dialogue with humans, could reach this level, if something beyond, which we reformulate in the category for-itself, then we have to think of a consciousness of the universe and it cannot be a thing, but a Being.
Why is there something and not nothing is a question raised since Leibniz, who solves it through the monad, and God is (would be) the “Monad of monads” (the phrase is from Hegel, sic!), then the universe was putting into movement, then in a quantum space-time, the Big Bang, and now the James Webb telescope captures an image that would be of a possible origin of the universe, with many galaxies, something is wrong.
In an article published in the journal Nature on February 22, “A population of red candidate massive galaxies 600 Myr after the Big Bang” (Labbé et al.) (Myr, millions of light years) indicates that close to the big bang there would already be massive galaxies and not the first formations of nebulae, for example (see our post), so could it be that there was already a universe in formation from the beginning?
Regardless of this, the question remains: who what or what mystery sent the beginning of everything.
Just as one cannot speak of ethics without metaphysics, it is not something substantial but spiritual, one cannot speak of consciousness only as something natural, based on experience.
Starting from Husserlian phenomenology, his disciple Heidegger elaborated consciousness as follows: the phenomenology (experience) of consciousness is not a path that lies before natural consciousness and leads it towards the absolute, like an itinerarium mentis in deum (Heidegger, 2007 , p. 169), rather it is the course that the absolute itself follows on the way to the truth of its complete appearing. (Heidegger, 2007, p. 169)
But Heidegger continues as in any modern building, he has the question of knowledge as a pillar of natural consciousness, he does not admit a transcendent revealed consciousness (for-itself), thus being a knowledge that has not yet realized in itself the whole truth (Heidegger 2007 , p. 169).
So it is about denying the truth revealed as truth, although your consciousness remains linked to the Being (it is ontological as your thought), there is no possibility of a pure primordial Being, a Being-for-itself, omniscient and omnipotent, so we are left looking at the telescope image.
There is a transcendent for-itself that surrounds this question, and thus a consciousness that projects beyond even the beginning of the universe, and that at the same time is present in every being-in-itself.
Heidegger, Martin (2007). Hegel. Translation by Dina V. Picotti C. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2007.
.
Changes in earth and sky
25
Nov
Little is analyzed about the great social changes in the history
of the earth and in human life, the earth came long before human life, they also represented man’s vision of the universe and its mysteries, and thus there is a correspondence between earthly changes and their corresponding cosmogony , whether this is just a coincidence or divine providence depends on the cosmovision itself, but it has changed for sure.
Thus, the vision of the cosmos at the beginning of Classical Antiquity is as evident as the birth of the Greek polis and its consequences for the modern world, Aristarchus of Samos (310 BC – 230 BC) came to calculate the radius of the Earth long before the circus navigation ( Fernão de Magalhães 1512), and also at the end of the Middle Ages the Ptolemaic idea of Geocentrism gave way to Copernican heliocentrism and the change from feudalism to modern liberalism can be linked to this change in astronomical vision.
In current times, initially Hubble and now James Webb have made man look to the ends of the universe and even a change in the modernity of relativity theory, black holes and wormholes show a universe in greater mutation than we expected, thousands of galaxies are born and die throughout the universe and our system is just a grain of sand.
Perhaps the great revolution is the change in the conception of time, we can look at the birth of the Universe (see our post on the divine locus) which may not be called eternity, but is more than a simple absolute dimension of time and space, and perhaps it is more than Einstein’s space-time dimension.
In the biblical path Adam and Eve appear at a time when man is already sedentary and no longer nomadic, since Cain was a farmer of the earth and Abel a shepherd of sheep, who knows, the death of Cain was the first land conflict of humanity, the It is certain that this fact is linked to a new sedentary worldview, just as Noah would correspond to a deluge, or perhaps a simple flood that occurred in the Arabian peninsula, since it is located below the Negro, where we can observe the narrow Bosphorus, the path of sea between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus, the time of Noah may have meant a geographical change, at least in that region of the planet that involved the transformation that took place further down between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the cradle of Arab civilization, and if there is no historical record of Noah, there is of his descendants: the Semites, from his son Shem, who had populated the region.
Thus, when speaking of the transformations that heavens and earth would undergo, the biblical reading of Luke (Lk 24, 37-39): “The coming of the Son of Man will be like in the time of Noah. For in the days before the flood, people were running and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark. And they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away. So shall it be in the life of the Son of Man,” the second coming called the Parousia.
The great civilizational crisis will not have to be just a change in the social structure, but it will certainly accompany a physical change on the planet, since its environmental forces are running out.
Where is the divine locus
10
Nov
Of course the divine locus is anti-spatial and temporal, even modern
quantum physics developed the theory of the space-time dimension as the only dimension and where there are folds in time, but it is likely that physics will still make discoveries greater than wormholes. , accelerated space travel dimensions and will change our cosmic view of space.
The latest discoveries by James Webb, the telescope that looks at the origin of creation, already sees in what astronomers call the pillars of creation, the new images (10/19) show formations that look like rocks, but which are clouds of gas and dust of astronomical dimensions, where stars and celestial bodies are formed, in a kind of nursery.
The new image, using James Webb’s infrared resource [and it is possible to better observe the dust in this region of star formation (Image from NASA above), improving the image on the left of 2014 from the Hubble telescope, the image on the right being the image by James Webb.
In terms of the eschatological cosmovision, the one that studies the beginning and end of humanity, it is possible to imagine that through a “time warp”, we are still stuck in Einstein’s physics, this cloud forms and starts a development of stars, supernovae and galaxies in the universe.
The divine plan is even broader, since the time of Jesus, men wanted to know when the “kingdom of God” would be formed, an earthly dimension in which our human condition would be elevated to a level of happiness and prosperity that would reach everyone. , “where milk and honey flow”, but the master’s answer was not very pleasing to those who wanted something more tangible.
The reading in John 1:20-21 says they wanted to know the moment of this “kingdom” and Jesus replied: “the kingdom of God does not come ostensibly, nor can it be said ‘is here or ‘is there, because the kingdom of God is among you”, that is, it must take place among men, so there will still be many changes in the human and earthly dimension until this stage.
And the passage clearly says that before this the son of man (Jesus who is a presence of God among us said above), will have to be rejected and will suffer much.
Thus, it is necessary to find spaces of solidarity and fraternity among men where these seeds of full life are developed, men understand each other and look with love for their fellow man, without contempt or exclusion.
So this kingdom is near where there is love and brotherhood and far away where there is greed and exclusion.
Wisdom and Human Mistakes
28
Sep
Wisdom is not what makes man never err, but what makes it possible to
correct the route, change course and continue the process of true and human asceticism as a result of errors.
The great scientific theory of our time, both for Karl Popper and for Thomas Kuhn, two great philosophers of science, is the possibility that there will always be a course correction in scientific methods and theories so that man knows more about himself and nature that surrounds it.
Quantum physics, for example, has its beginnings in the enunciation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which stated that it was not possible to know exactly what the position of the particles of an atom was with exactitude, Planck who did not agree, it is his statement “I do not agree may God play dice”, went to the laboratory to prove this principle.
NASA (in the photo the crash of the spacecraft colliding with Dimorphos) has just made a scientific feat which is to hit a satellite of a small meteor, which does not pose any danger of collision with Earth, just to prove that it is possible to change course some celestial body, and with that, in case of danger to Earth, change its route.
The DART project is a test for a possible future mission to deflect an asteroid from colliding with Earth, for cosmic dimensions Dimorphos is small (160 m) and orbits another larger asteroid (780 m) called Didymos and form a binary system, the spacecraft that hit it was traveling at 22.015 km/h and the image seen from a telescope in Hawaii on Monday night (26/09, see below) shows that the impact produced many fragments, the deviation from the route, however, is small.
Changing route is wise, when you admit the mistake, but it requires two steps: admitting the mistake and then having the humility to change route.
Image of telescope in Havaii of Project Atlas:
ATLAS observations of the DART spacecraft impact at Didymos! pic.twitter.com/26IKwB9VSo
— ATLAS Project (@fallingstarIfA) September 27, 2022
The Einstein Ring and the Spheres
08
Sep
It was the philosopher Sloterdijk who was the first to create the
relationship between man and his spheres, from the maternal womb to the planet, he is largely right, also in criticizing cynical reason, the one that justifies spherical reality is largely correct, it is a metaphor, but very good.
Let us think of the fetus, which remains within the sphere of the uterus until it leaves and looks at its ex-sphere, the mother, will still feel her dependence for a long time, it happens that this sociological, anthropological, semiotic reality has its own topological properties that are hidden in the cynical reason.
One of them is to understand that there is an immunological relationship whose primary purpose is to protect, nourish, train and immunize homo from an unknown sapiens exterior, like the baby who at birth depends on the mother, he needs her immunological protection.
The search for other spaces, inhabiting the moon (the new mission finds it difficult) and mars (astronauts think it would be horrible to live there) does not resolve the planetary spherical relationship, in crisis, it is necessary to open up to the other and leave of the hut, some psychologists speculate about the hut syndrome, which the pandemic has accelerated, not wanting to leave a sheltered, spherical environment.
The super telescope James Webb photographs Einstein’s ring in a place far away and physically unreachable by man (the image), at least under current technological conditions, and the physicist’s prediction was “photographed” (actually the instruments are of frequencies and not of “photos”) with formidable precision, one can extend Sloterdijk’s metaphor.
Gerald’s 1916 theory of Gravity revolutionized physics by creating a physics that claimed that gravity is a curvature of the space-time continuum caused by the mass of objects, almost two massive objects were perfectly aligned with the Earth this space-time would deflect the photons forming rings around the alignment of these two objects.
An English physicist named Sir Oliver Lodge suggested that this phenomenon of a massive gravitational field would not only deflect light from an object behind it, but also magnify it forming a gravitational lens, and the recent James Webb photo confirms this phenomenon.
What is the metaphor, massive immunological spheres, cultures, religions or ideologies whose purpose is to protect themselves when close (or on a collision course which makes the metaphor more complicated) not only form a strong gravitational field that draws bodies around, they do not they only distort space-time, but they are also lenses that, if carefully observed, allow us to see what is behind.
So it is time to look beyond the differences, the imperfections of the spherological models and enable a gravitational attraction that helps to better understand the civilizing process.
Pre-occupation and mystery
14
Jul
As we developed the themes of last week, the clearing is the abode
of the Being, in general and within certain contexts: “what is hidden within the whole, and from where the Being must emerge” that we elaborated there, this is what enchants the first images of the James Webb observatory, within the context of the universe, to look at great mysteries and phenomena there.
Leaving the occupation and entering the mystery is thus an expansion of the Being, when we discovered a new world at the end of the Middle Ages, a set of discoveries around science were also being illuminated and they too were the beginning of a clearing, but the close link to subjectivism, the path of a materialist objectivism had once again been hidden.
Pre-occupation, meaning what occupies our mind and, consequently, our act, develops in the whirlwind of modernity in a “society of Burnout”, where pre-occupation leads at the same time to mental and social exhaustion, and a lack of contemplation, that is, our inability to “admire and think about something” in a contemplative state.
Thus, it is only possible to leave pre-occupation through a process of clearing the Being, a plunge into the mystery, an ability to “put in parentheses” our thoughts and actions (the method of the phenomenological epoché), and thus return to “breathing” and leaving the toxicity of the modern world, we do not fail to analyze and observe the serious facts of contemporaneity.
Thus, the concealment, the mystification or false “mystification” of reality is opposite to the clearing, and very different from the occultism, the example of James Webb’s images and studies are a clear vision of this plunge into the mystery, where we can always find novelties and new enigmas. .
Pre-occupation is the sameness of the contemporary world, false problems and real problems hidden in discourses and addicted ways of seeing reality, like someone with vision difficulties and not subject to the use of glasses to clarify reality.
Contemplating is a complementary act with active life, and only it allows a unity of Being, where even in dark moments there is light and serenity.
James Webb’s First 5 Images
13
Jul
The first color images of James Webb have arrived, they
are really amazing and also the tools available to users, in addition to all the internal resources of course.
A historic target was Stephan’s Quintet, the first compact group of galaxies that was discovered in 1787, it is in the constellation of Pegasus, as the name implies, there are five galaxies, four of which dance between them and two are very close.
Birth in the so-called Southern Ring, an immense cloud of gas surrounding a dying star resulted from eight explosions from an ancient sun now reduced to a white dwarf.
An authentic “nursery” of a star, the white dots inside an enormous “mystical mountain” made by elements that “feed” the formation of a star, the so-called Carina nebula.
The other equally spectacular images were the first giant exoplanet, about half the size of Jupiter, of WASP-96 b, discovered in 2014 and which was shown using internal resources the spectrum of elements present on it, that is, if it has water and other chemical elements that make it up.
And finally a fifth image was shown of the cluster of galaxies, SMACS 0723, which works as if it were a cosmic magnifying glass to see and see what other galaxies are like and this is just the first.
Using an available zoom tool allows you to choose your target (in options above, for 5 images: JWST) and take the tour by traveling millions of light years and having an experience close to scientists.
