Le Verrier. In Le Verrier had predicted the position of Neptune, and the new planet promptly discovered in Berlin later that same year. The story also involves the development of the first reflecting telescope to a use metal-on-glass primary mirror. The new companion of Sirius turned out to be a remarkably faint yet massive star. It would require more than five decades before astronomers appreciated that the small companion represented an entirely new type of star, a white dwarf.
More about the fascinating events surrounding the discovery of Sirius B can be found below. The belt's three stars point downward toward Sirius to the left. To be more precise, the position of Sirius is:. Today, Sirius is nicknamed the "Dog Star" because it is part of the constellation Canis Major, Latin for "the greater dog. The ancients felt that the combination of the sun during the day and the star at night was responsible for the extreme heat during mid-summer.
The star is present in ancient astronomical records of the Greeks, Polynesians and several other cultures. The Egyptians even went so far as to base their calendar on when Sirius was first visible in the eastern sky, shortly before sunrise. According to Space. In , English astronomer Edmond Halley discovered that stars have " proper motion " relative to one another. This means that stars, including Sirius, move across our sky with a predictable angular motion with respect to more-distant stars.
More than years after Halley's finding, in , German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel published a scientific note in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describing how Sirius had been deviating from its predicted movement in the sky since Bessel hypothesized that an unseen companion star affected Sirius' motion.
Alvan Graham Clark, a U. Sirius B is a white dwarf star , which is the last observable stage of a low- to medium-mass star. White dwarfs get dimmer and dimmer until they eventually stop burning and go dark, thus becoming black dwarf stars — the theoretical final stage of a star's evolution.
They also appear in Babylonian, Accadian, and Sumerian myths. The Egyptian Goddess Isis, who is sometimes depicted as a mermaid, is also linked with the star Sirius. The Nommos, according to the Dogon legend, lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system.
They landed on Earth in an "ark" that made a spinning decent to the ground with great noise and wind. It was the Nommos that gave the Dogon the knowledge about Sirius B. The legend goes on to say the Nommos also furnished the Dogon's with some interesting information about our own solar system: That the planet Jupiter has four major moons, that Saturn has rings and that the planets orbit the sun.
These were all facts discovered by Westerners only after Galileo invented the telescope. The story of the Dogon and their legend was first brought to popular attention by Robert K. Temple in a book published in called The Sirius Mystery. Science writer Ian Ridpath and astronomer Carl Sagan made a reply to Temple's book, suggesting that this modern knowledge about Sirius must have come from Westerners who discussed astronomy with the Dogon priests.
The priests then included this new information into the older traditions. This, in turn, mislead the anthropologists. This is a possibility considering Sirius B's existence was suspected as early as and seen was through a telescope in It doesn't seem to explain a year old Dogon artifact that apparently depicts the Sirius configuration nor the ceremonies held by the Dogon since the 13th century to celebrate the cycle of Sirius A and B.
It also doesn't explain how the Dogons knew about the super-density of Sirius B, a fact only discovered a few years before the anthropologists recorded the Dogon stories. It is also important to remember that although many parts of the Dogon legends seem to ring true, other portions are clearly mistaken. One of the Dogon's beliefs is that Sirius B occupied the place where our Sun is now.
Physics clearly prohibits this. Also, if the Dogon believe that Sirius B orbits Sirius A every 50 years, why do they hold their celebrations every 60 years? Sirius A is the brightest star in our sky and can easily be seen in the winter months in the northern hemisphere.
Look for the constellation Orion. Orion's belt are the three bright stars in a row. Follow an imaginary line through the three stars to Sirius which is just above the horizon.
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