SCHOLARS OF THE DAWN | ANCIENT MASTERS
TTP 2026
10 April, Bandorban
WHAT ARE THE BRIGHT GLITTERING DOTS IN THE HEAVENS?
Stars actually come from the word STEORRA!
FANTASIES OF IMAGINARY CHARACTERS IN STARS : CONSTELLATIONS
Nakshatra was referred to the 27-28 stellar arrangement in the night sky.
HEAVENLY BODIES MOVING THROUGH GENERATIONS, AGES, ERAS, AEONS
THE ANCIENT WORSHIPPERS
ANCIENT EGYPTIANS - PYRAMIDS
INDESTRUCTIBLE STARS
CIRCUMPOLAR
ROTATION
Egyptians were drawn to two bright stars that always could be seen circling the North Pole. The Egyptians referred to those stars as "the indestructibles." Today we know them as Kochab, in the bowl of the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor), and Mizar, in the middle of the handle of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major).
Each of the two stars was about 10 degrees from the celestial pole which lay directly between them. When one star was exactly above the other in the sky, astronomers could find a line that pointed due north.
Earth's axis is unstable. Our planet wobbles like a gyroscope over a period of 26,000 years. Modern astronomers now know that the celestial north pole was exactly aligned between Kochab and Mizar only in the year 2467 B.C. Before or after that date, the Egyptian astronomers would have been less accurate as they tried to mark true north.
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN - CALENDAR
Kom Ombo Temple: XII - I
The ancient Egyptian calendar – a civil calendar – was a solar calendar with a 365-day year. The year consisted of three seasons of 120 days each, plus an intercalary month of five epagomenal days treated as outside of the year proper. Each season was divided into four months of 30 days. These twelve months were initially numbered within each season but came to also be known by the names of their principal festivals. Each month was divided into three 10-day periods known as decans or decades.
based upon astronomical observations of Sirius[15] whose reappearance in the sky closely corresponded to the average onset of the Nile flood through the 5th and 4th millennium BC
Helical Rising of Dog Star: SIRIUS
Sirius, also called Alpha Canis Majoris or the Dog Star, brightest star in the night sky, with apparent visual magnitude −1.46. It is a binary star in the constellation Canis Major. The bright component of the binary is a blue-white star 25.4 times as luminous as the Sun.
THE STONEHENGE
Some ancient people around 5,000 years ago set up large stones to mark the movement of the Sun and other stars. One of those old observatories is Stonehenge in what we now call England.
THE BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM
THE BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM
Babylonians recognized five planets, along with the sun and moon, and called them “wild sheep” because of their wandering paths.
A cycle of 223 months in the pattern of eclipses
Saturn rises in the same place in the sky every 59 years
Outer Planets: Prograde &
Retrograde Motion
THE BABYLONIAN CUNEIFORM EXPLAINED – HIPPARCHUS & PTOLEMY
PRECESSION
The Earth’s axis is tilted to its orbital plane.
The gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon
on the Earth’s equatorial bulge
tends to pull it back toward the plane of the ecliptic.
Since the Earth is spinning, its axis precesses.
The North Celestial Pole traces out a precessional circle around the pole of the ecliptic, and this means that the equinoxes precess backward around the ecliptic,
at the rate of 50.35 arc-seconds per year
(around 26,000 years for a complete cycle).
Around 2000 years ago, the Sun was in the constellation of Aries at the spring equinox, in Cancer at the summer solstice, in Libra at the autumn equinox, and in Capricorn at the winter solstice. Precession means that all of these have changed, but we still use the old names (e.g. the First Point of Aries for the vernal equinox), and the symbols for the vernal and autumnal equinoxes are the astrological symbols for Aries and Libra.
PRECESSION
ASTRO-GEOMETRY: EARTH’S CIRCUMFERENCE
An ancient Greek astronomer named Eratosthenes was the first man to measure the size of the Earth accurately. His method was very simple: he measured the angle made by a shadow cast from a vertical stick in two different cities on the same day and time. With the help of another teacher, you can recreate Eratosthenes’ experiment and your students can measure the size of the Earth for themselves! All you will need is two yardsticks, a protractor, a magnetic compass, and a bit of string.
YOUR CHOICE IS A RIPPLE IN THE RIVER OF TIME��ENOUGH RIPPLES CAN BRING CHANGE TO THE TIDE�
“AS YOU KEEP MOVING, THE PATH WILL APPEAR BY ITSELF”
Best Wishes!
Fatema Zerin Prottasha
VNSC | IUT | Unilever
THE HIDDEN FORCES
Bibha Astronomical Workshop
4 March 2023
INVISIBLE PULL OF GRAVITATION:�DARK MATTER
The first real evidence for dark matter came in 1933, when Caltech's Fritz Zwicky used the Mount Wilson Observatory to measure the visible mass of a cluster of galaxies and found that it was much too small to prevent the galaxies from escaping the gravitational pull of the cluster.
IS ROTATIONAL VELOCITY NOT GOING DOWN??
SPIRAL GALAXIES Are Flat Rotating Systems. The Stars And Gas In The Disk Are Moving In Nearly Circular Orbits, With The Gravitational Field Of The Galaxy Providing The Inward Acceleration Required For The Circular Motion. The Rotation Of These Galaxies Is Usually Not Like A Solid Body: The Angular Velocity Of The Rotation Typically Decreases With Radius. To A Fair Approximation, Assuming Newtonian Gravity, The Rotational Velocity V (R) At Radius R Is Related To The Total Mass M(r) Within Radius R By The Equation
V^2(r) = Gm(r)/R, Where G Is The Gravitational Constant.
The radial variation of the rotational velocity (the
rotation curve) is most readily measured from the gas
in the disks. The emission lines of ionized gas in the
inner regions are measured with optical spectrographs.
With radio synthesis telescopes, rotation curves can be
measured from the neutral hydrogen (H I) which emits
a narrow spectral line at 1420 MHz (21 cm wavelength).
The interest in measuring rotation curves of spiral galaxies is that they give a direct measure of the radial distribution of the total gravitating mass.
In the late 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford of the Carnegie Institution of Washington stared, confused, at the punch-card readouts from their observations of the andromeda galaxy. ��The vast spiral seemed to be rotating all wrong. the stuff at the edges was moving just as fast as the stuff near the center, apparently violating newton’s laws of motion (which also govern how the planets move around our sun). While the explanation for that strange behavior didn’t become clear to Rubin until two years later, these printouts represented the first direct evidence of dark matter.
DARK MATTER
ACCELERATED EXPANSION: �DARK ENERGY
Dark energy was discovered in 1998 by two teams of astronomers, who measured light coming from exploding stars called Type IA supernovae, known as "standard candles" for their consistent brightness.
ACCELERATED EXPANSION
Brian, based at the Australian National University, found this unexpected expansion by looking at a specific type of exploding star called type 1a supernova. His team measured the distances of many of them.
A kind of cosmic repulsive force was first hypothesized by Albert Einstein in 1917 and was represented by a term, the “cosmological constant,” that Einstein reluctantly introduced into his theory of general relativity in order to counteract the attractive force of gravity and account for a universe that was assumed to be static (neither expanding nor contracting). After the discovery in the 1920s by American astronomer Edwin Hubble that the universe is not static but is in fact expanding, Einstein referred to the addition of this constant as his “greatest blunder.” However, the measured amount of matter in the mass-energy budget of the universe was improbably low, and thus some unknown “missing component,” much like the cosmological constant, was required to make up the deficit. Direct evidence for the existence of this component, which was dubbed dark energy, was first presented in 1998.
ACCELERATED EXPANSION: �DARK ENERGY
Dark energy is detected by its effect on the rate at which the universe expands and its effect on the rate at which large-scale structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies form through gravitational instabilities. The measurement of the expansion rate requires the use of telescopes to measure the distance (or light travel time) of objects seen at different size scales (or redshifts) in the history of the universe. These efforts are generally limited by the difficulty in accurately measuring astronomical distances. Since dark energy works against gravity, more dark energy accelerates the universe’s expansion and retards the formation of large-scale structures.
IMPACTS OF DARK ENERGY
Studying the effect of dark energy on large-scale structures involves measuring subtle distortions in the shapes of galaxies arising from the bending of space by intervening matter, a phenomenon known as “weak lensing.”
At some point in the last few billion years, dark energy became dominant in the universe and thus prevented more galaxies and clusters of galaxies from forming. This change in the structure of the universe is revealed by weak lensing.
Another measure comes from counting the number of clusters of galaxies in the universe to measure the volume of space and the rate at which that volume is increasing. The goals of most observational studies of dark energy are to measure its equation of state (the ratio of its pressure to its energy density), variations in its properties, and the degree to which dark energy provides a complete description of gravitational physics.
ARE THE HIDDEN FORCES AT EQUILIBRIUM?
FLAT UNIVERSE?
“I Am Humbled By The Universe. We Should Be Embarrassed At Some Level About How Little We Know, But This Can Also Be An Opportunity To Learn More.”��MARK WISE
Best Wishes!
Fatema Zerin Prottasha
VNSC | IUT | Unilever