7 ms·
Colour evolution of Betelgeuse over two millennia, derived from records
- pinewurst 4y agohttps://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04702 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04702
- mikeytown2 4y agoOur main result is that Betelgeuse was recorded with a color significantly different (non-red) than today. Hyginus (Rome) and Sima Qian (China) independently report it two millennia ago as appearing like Saturn in color and `yellow', respectively different from today. From the article
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- anigbrowl 4y agoI have doubts about the ability to control for atmospheric changes, cultural differences, and linguistic drift.
- not_kurt_godel 4y agoDid you read the paper or are you just spouting off about the most obvious possible issue and assume that people who write and review papers on this subject for a living didn't think of it?
- gfodor 4y agoI don’t think I’ve ever seen put to words the question that runs through everyone’s minds at least once for any HN thread, but you’ve done it.
- irrational 4y agoWell, HN could stand for Hubris News. There do seem to be a lot of people around that seem to think that they are smarter in every field than actual experts in those fields.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThere may be a forum somewhere where those people don't post, but I have not yet found it.
- spoonjim 4y ago
- freemint 4y agoWow. Hubris found. Do you mean experts when you say experts or are you limiting yourself to "experts in the USA"? Because i am quite certain you would not out do the experts running Taiwan or Japan.
- spoonjim 4y agoI do mean “experts” in the USA
- not_kurt_godel 4y agoWhat specific examples are you talking about?
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- anigbrowl 4y agoI went by the abstract, and didn't have time to look for a preprint since I don't have institutional access. Did you read the paper or are you just snarking for social points?
- ateng 4y agoAnd the abstract mentioned the colour changes are compared with Saturn. Surely that’s sufficient to address your concern on linguistics and cultural drift?
- tomrod 4y agoI share the concern. When whole colors didn't even have names several thousand years ago, things can be dubious (e.g. wine-dark sea). This is part of peer-review -- being able to defend the ideas. When the academic "peer" group is reduced to "only those from certain institutions and pedigrees" it really waters down the quality of peer review. Go back 250 years, and peer review was your buddy you met at a symposium two countries over, because only a handful of folks had general interest (i.e. no Quanta magazine yet). If the exposition of those ideas are locked behind a paywall from peers with interest, then it really isn't very peer reviewable. I too do not have institutional access.
- anigbrowl 4y agowine-dark sea I have often wondered about that one - is it due to light intensity at Mediterranean latitudes, or the frequency of storms, or the predominance of bronze at the time? Or was there a greater variety of grapes and wine colors? Or is it to do with the absence of glass, so that colors were appraised as they appeared in metallic drinking vessels?
- anigbrowl 4y agoThat defends on how broad or narrow bands of color similarity are across different cultures. Those do vary and mutate, and three are also zones of indeterminacy - remember the arguments over 'what color is this dress, blue or gold'? Linguistic drift can occur due to contact with other cultures, changing environmental conditions, availability of new dyes, or political factors. As an example of the latter, consider an absolute monarch with a color vision deviation from the biological norm. Their opinions about colors could become the 'official' one, and over a long reign this could become institutionalized. Chinese culture, for example, identifies 5 fundamental colors and they're invested with far more symbolic specificity than in western societies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture And I'm not trying to be dismissive of the paper. I just have some doubts because it needs to pile methodological inferences on top of each other over a wide variation in both space and time. If you throw lots of different circles on a Venn diagram and they all have a pretty consistent overlap, then yes, that probably means something. It's a worthwhile approach. But the fuzzier the boundaries, the harder that task becomes. I'm happy to buy into the idea that Betelgeuse changed color relatively recently and people noticed: my point was to list some confounding factors that make pinning that down very challenging.
- teraflop 4y agoIt's not perfect, but those factors are largely controlled for because the authors are comparing descriptions of different stars from the same source relative to each other. That is, Betelgeuse was described in terms that were dissimilar to "red" stars and similar to "yellowish" stars of similar brightness, and those groupings were relatively consistent across multiple different sources.
- vlovich123 4y agoIt certainly sounds like an interesting and novel approach. Is this the first paper ever to do something like this? This kind of isn’t my field so apologies for two likely dumb questions that came up for me. How do we know that the description isn’t written by someone with some kind of color blindness or some other kind of eye issue that impacts the description of it’s only using one source? How do we know that color descriptions aren’t impacted by human perception evolving over time? For the second question what I mean is that I seem to recall that humans didn’t even used to have language to describe different shades that just didn’t exist so there’s an aspect of language and I wonder if the lack of access to those shades alters the actual ability for humans of different eras to recognize that color in the first place.
- teraflop 4y agoI'm certainly no expert either, but as I understand it, the effect of language on color perception is complex and still under debate. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... However, the claim the authors of this paper seem to be making is that ancient observers did perceive and distinguish different colors of stars -- as evidenced by the fact that they grouped stars in a way that largely matches modern observations -- but that Betelgeuse is a notable outlier in their observations compared to modern ones. That can't be explained by simply saying that the observers were less perceptive than we are now. And it's not just one source, but multiple observers from different cultures whose observations corroborate one another.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoWhat doubts are those? What atmospheric changes? And can you share with us which particular cultural differences and lingustic drifts you mean? It sounds like you have doubts - which is fine - but you don't actually have the necessary knowledge to make these into solid counterpoints, peer review arguments, or competing scientific paper. As others point out, this is a common issue on HN and comment sections in general.
- tomrod 4y agoI share the doubts with the OP. Your comments are ad hominem. It doesn't matter whether OP has the "necessary knowledge" (read: pedigree and institutional background) to bring up clear confounders. The mere naming of them is sufficient to make the link. The names of colors have evolved -- no word for Orange for a long time! Perhaps "Yellow" was used instead. Further, without public access, there is no great way for the OP to respond directly. Thus, the onus is on the paper's distribution. But you don't call that out. Why?
- beowulfey 4y agoIt is freely available on ArXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04702 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04702
- tomrod 4y agoCan you confirm this is the post-publication print, not a pre-publication? Not that the content is changed substantially -- but it could have.
- beowulfey 4y agoWell, the paper was released on July 29th, and the last revision (v2) of the ArXiv document was July 27th, so without going through the whole thing twice I would strongly suspect they are the same.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
- aaron695 4y ago
- matkoniecz 4y agoI wonder whether production of this paywalled work was funded with tax money. I tried reading it, sadly it appears to demand €14.00 for 24h access and is not even making clear whether I would be able to download DRM free text.
- sandgiant 4y agoIt most certainly is funded with tax money. This usually means that the work has to be publicly accessible. Which it is on https://arxiv.org https://arxiv.org. I agree that the fees journals charge to access (even your own) work is absurd, but it's not something most astronomers worry about. astro-ph is where it happens. I don't know about other fields, but the arXiv is really fantastic for astronomy/astrophysics.
- freemint 4y ago> This usually means that the work has to be publicly accessible. False. There is mo such has to. Although europe is making progress in that direction. > Which it is on https://arxiv.org https://arxiv.org. Often false. Arxiv only captures a fraction of disciplines.
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- thesuitonym 4y agoEmail the authors. They will often send you the document for free.
- vanderZwan 4y agoI'm really curious how they accounted for many color names being relatively recent, including basic things like "blue".
- ctrlmeta 4y ago> Hyginus (Rome) and Sima Qian (China) independently report it two millennia ago as appearing like Saturn (B−V=1.09 ± 0.16 mag) in colour and ‘yellow’ (quantifiable as B−V=0.95 ± 0.35 mag), respectively (together, 5.1σ different from today).
- vanderZwan 4y ago> appearing like Saturn Ah, that's a smart workaround!