11 ms·
Constellations are younger than continents
- runsWphotons 3y agoHow accurately could we predict when betelgeuse will go? What are the CIs?
- geuis 3y agoPart of the problem is that direct observations of supernovas is small and indirect. We have small numbers of recorded occurrences to judge from.
- ianburrell 3y agoAlso, we don’t have observations of the stars before supernova. Most are in other galaxies so don’t even see the star. Betelgeuse is first case where we can observe late stage star closely.
- MengerSponge 3y agoLiterally any moment in the next 10000 years. The probability distribution (afaict) is pretty flat, and either 1000, 10000, or 1000000 years long.
- rini17 3y agoAnimation from GAIA data: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2020/12/Gaia_s_stellar_motion_for_the_next_1.6_million_years https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2020/12/Gaia_s_ste...
- Rhaomi 3y agohttps://www.theonion.com/darling-i-will-give-you-the-moon-and-the-stars-vs-giv-1819594304 https://www.theonion.com/darling-i-will-give-you-the-moon-an...
- kybernetikos 3y agoI think the constellations through the ages chart make it clear that orion has been recognisable long enough to see continents change and will be recognisable for a long time to come.
- bleuarff 3y agoThe article goes on to say these stars are very young at ~10My, which is about the smallest time scale at which you might notice some change on continents'aspect. So you're probably technically right, but by a very thin margin.
- layer8 3y agoDid you read the article? The stars in Orion are only between 6 and 12 million years old, and the continents already looked almost the same as today in that time frame. Furthermore, they are types of stars that won't live very long, at most 20 million more years. Betelgeuse will go supernova within just the next 100,000 years. The Orion stars will see a little bit of continental movement over their lifetime, but not "rise and fall".
- nickdothutton 3y agoThere is a nice simulation of constellations changing over time in one of the episodes of Sagan’s Cosmos, where he explains parallax and some of the other important phenomena.
- aebtebeten 3y agoH A Rey The Stars (1952) had a nice series of cartoons depicting a caveman, a grey-flannel-suit man, and a futuristic man all looking at their respective versions of the big dipper. The Barbers' When They Severed Earth From Sky (2004) hypothesises that the various kingship changes in heaven of several ancient mythologies correspond to the precession of the solstices and equinoxes through the zodiac. Eg, for Greek mythology, they give: Head God Summer Spring CHAOS Libra Cancer ~6480 BC OURANOS Virgo Gemini ~4320 BC KRONOS Leo Taurus ~2160 BC ZEUS Cancer Aries along with parallel tables for Babylonian, Hittite, Phoenician, and Norse mythologies, and reference a different work which should give Germanic, Finnic, Iranian, Indian, and Chinese mythological shifts. According to this hypothesis, when the fall equinox moved into Virgo and Saturn and Jupiter came into conjunction with Pisces in 6 BC, many ancients took it as marking the advent of a new Kingdom of Heaven ruling a New Age, making them more susceptible to picking up new religions emanating from the middle east around that time, eg Mithraism. Does Virgil, writing ca 40 BC, predict the New Age? [Fourth Eclogue 4-10] > Now is come the last age of Cumaean song; the great line of the centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high. Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall at last cease and a golden race spring up throughout the world! (but note that by this counting the "Age of Aquarius" wouldn't be due to start until ca 2160; rather far off in human lifetimes from the 1960s)
- nickdothutton 3y agoThis is tremendous. One could write a book relating well documented history and mythology with the changing constellations.
- whartung 3y ago
- NKosmatos 3y agoThis article brought back memories of when I was playing around with astronomy simulation software like Redshift by Maris Multimedia. I started searching for it, and as it usually goes with HN stories, I ended up on their new/modern version of it over at: https://redshiftsky.com https://redshiftsky.com A brief history of their famous titles (check also aviation) is over at: http://archaic.maris.com/content/indexe5cc.html http://archaic.maris.com/content/indexe5cc.html Older versions of Redshift can be downloaded/found over at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/redshift_202204 https://archive.org/details/redshift_202204 https://archive.org/details/redshift2 https://archive.org/details/redshift2 https://archive.org/details/Redshift_3_Maris_Multimedia_1998 https://archive.org/details/Redshift_3_Maris_Multimedia_1998
- asystole 3y agoThere’s also the FLOSS Stellarium: http://stellarium.org/ http://stellarium.org/
- bjackman 3y agoAlso: Polaris (the north star) is younger than sharks. (This one is less interesting as an overall observation about timescales though. Polaris is just quite a young star and sharks are quite and old life form).
- vasco 3y agoTrees are also younger than sharks.
- Sharlin 3y agoAs the article implies, all the brightest stars in Orion are younger than hominids. Indeed they formed around the time when the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived.
- kibwen 3y agoPolaris as the north star is younger than the Roman Empire! Because of the precession of the Earth's axis, Polaris didn't become the north star until about 500 AD. To the ancient Egyptians, Thuban was the north star. When humans were first discovering agriculture 12,000 years ago, Vega was the north star. Wikipedia has a great table showing the cycle of north stars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star#Precession_of_the_equinoxes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star#Precession_of_the_...
- xapata 3y agoSo, that "I am as constant as the northern star" simile is a little mixed?
- p-o 3y agoThese kind of facts always blow my mind. For instance, the Sun orbits the milky way once every 212m years. That means that if the sun existed from the big bang to now, it would have only done ~63 complete revolutions around Sagittarius A*. If you account for the Milky Way's creation, that number gets even lower. I'm no expert, so maybe this makes sense to someone who knows more about this, but it definitively feel weird to me.
- mihaitodor 3y agoI wondered the same thing and I asked Sean Carroll about it [1]. He didn’t go into much detail, but here is his answer: > I guess my only insight is, I'm not sure why you relate the number of revolutions that the Milky Way has made to its complex and symmetric structure. The spiral arms that you see in a galaxy like the Milky Way do not rigidly rotate with it, they are more like... This is complicated, but they are more like regions where star formation is going on, and therefore the galaxy is brighter rather than regions where there's more density or anything like that. So if you're worrying how the spiral structure forms. It can form pretty easily in one or two revolutions, I don't see why it would take even 68, much less, but need more than that. [1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/09/ama-october-2023/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/09/ama-...
- firebot 3y agoProblem with Sean and most cosmologists is they are proliferate regurgitates with little independent thought.
- ben_w 3y agoEven before LLMs were dismissed as "stochastic parrots" (and even more so since then), I find myself noticing when people dismiss the intellectual capacity of entire groups. "Mickey Mouse degrees", https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/, the attitude displayed by the bully in "Zero for Conduct" and similar IRL dismissals of the entire ME area in the post 9/11 discourse, mid-Brexit politicians saying the country had had enough of experts, some of my fist girlfriends' anecdotes from her childhood, town v gown, …
- FergusArgyll 3y agoLife in West Virginia is younger than the mountains but older than the trees
- ggsp 3y agoIsn’t life everywhere older than the trees?
- hfgjbcgjbvg 3y agoI believe it’s a reference to a John Denver song.
- ggsp 3y agoOh, ha, thanks for pointing that out :)
- Semiapies 3y agoIf you take it as "life on land", it's accurate on both counts. Those are some old mountains.
- jameshart 3y agohttps://twitter.com/bookishseawitch/status/1572751278366949376 https://twitter.com/bookishseawitch/status/15727512783669493... “the appalachian mountains are older than saturn’s rings. the appalachian mountains are older than dinosaurs. the appalachian mountains are older than trees. the appalachian mountains are literally older than BONES. the appalachian mountains should be regarded with pure terror.”
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- rpmisms 3y ago
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- krisoft 3y agoAlso, not to mention that constellations are a human made construct. It is like how day night cycles are natural, and have existed before us, but calling every seventh cycle “monday” is not. The stars and their appearance on the sky is natural like the day-night cycles, while how they are grouped together and what they are called is human made. (And different civilisations had wildly differing opinions on how this should be done.)
- nullindividual 3y agoWouldn’t Saturday be the seventh cycle, given it is the end of the week?
- JadeNB 3y ago> Wouldn’t Saturday be the seventh cycle, given it is the end of the week? Every 7th cycle would be the start of the week; the 6th cycle would be the end. (Think, for example, if you had a 2-day week; the 1st cycle would take you to the 2nd day.) But when the week starts is not universally agreed—I believe USians usually start it on Sunday, and Europeans usually start it on Monday.
- ianburrell 3y agoThere are seven day weeks, the 1st to 7th. The 8th day is the start of the next week. The 1st cycle is the 1st day.
- evanb 3y ago'Every' modifies the meaning. It's just as sensible and correct to say 'every second number is even' and 'every second number is odd'.
- nine_k 3y agoNo matter how one would choose to group stars in the sky, the point is that their relative angular closeness varies faster than that of continents on our planet.
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- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI was surprised to learn that Pangaea is believed to have formed and broke up at least five times so far.
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- p3rls 3y agoTolkien himself was unsure if we were in the 6th or 7th age --- I doubt if there would have been much gain; and I hope the, evidently long but undefined, gap* in time between the Fall of Barad-dûr and our Days is sufficient for 'literary credibility', even for readers acquainted with what is known or surmised of 'pre-history' I imagine the gap to be about 6000 years : that is we are now at the end of the Fifth Age, if the Ages were of about the same length as S.A. and T.A. But they have, I think, quickened; and I imagine we are actually at the end of the Sixth Age, or in the Seventh. Source - The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 211
- labster 3y agoWe have basically had to conclude that Tolkien’s star Borgil[0] is Aldebaran, because Betelgeuse wasn’t a red star in the classical era[1], or before. [0]: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Borgil https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Borgil [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32478492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32478492
- andrewflnr 3y agoPangaea is only the name of the most recent supercontinent. The past ones all have their own names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent
- 082349872349872 3y agoOf the 10 on that list, multicellular life appears around #8 (Pannotia).
- knorker 3y agoAnother one: dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy. The galaxy has revolved about half a revolution since then.
- Tommstein 3y agoThe Milky Way is also moving through space. So they actually existed way out in intergalactic space (probably).
- mncharity 3y agoA UI can combine those two: Sun's galactic orbit as analog-clock selector, and MW motion (wrt CBR, towards Great Attractor) as a slider. Though IIRC, the range of a slider with a finger-tip sized MW is relatively limited. Yay implicit curriculum.
- antognini 3y agoThere is an interesting theory about the Pleiades star cluster [1]. The Pleiades are somewhat unique in that they are a prominent feature of the sky and close to the celestial equator. Because of that, they are visible to every population on Earth, and every culture has developed a story around them. Around 2/3 of cultures have a story in which there are seven things (seven sisters, seven boys, seven chickens, and so forth.). The other 1/3 of cultures have a story in which there are six things. And a surprising number of them have a story in which there were originally seven, but one got lost (like in the Greek myth of Electra). The interesting thing is that two of the stars in the cluster are quite close together and can't be distinguished by eye. A pair of astronomers looked at the proper motions of the stars in the cluster and figured out that tens of thousands of years ago these two stars were far enough apart that they could have been distinguished by eye. So it seems that early humans recognized the Pleiades as having seven stars and this persisted in the myths of most cultures for tens of thousands of years, even when the seventh star was no longer visible. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09170 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09170
- Amezarak 3y agoAlthough I like the idea, there's no reason to posit the preservation of the myth of a lost star for tens of thousands of years. People can still see all Seven Sisters under the right conditions, and the right conditions were probably much more prevalent back before the insane degree of light and air pollution that exists today. https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/many-pleiades-can-see10222014/ https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/many-pleiades-can...
- dharmab 3y agoWould this have been true in a society without optics and therefore corrective lenses?
- calamari4065 3y agoWhen I was young, I was told a story about how native tribes used the star as a vision test for warriors. Only people with excellent vision could discern the second star. No idea if there's any truth in the story, but I wouldn't be surprised
- vardump 3y agoHumanity might one day spread to all over the galaxy by hitchhiking passing stars. Well, assuming we don't self-annihilate ourselves at some point. Or be destroyed by some cataclysm. I guess we'd better spread to as many locations in the solar system as, err, humanly possible.
- perlgeek 3y agoCommunication across interstellar space would be super slow, because the speed of light is so slow compared to the distances, like, at least several years for a single one-way message. This makes it likely that if we ever do settle multiple stars, culture and language will diverge pretty strongly across the different settlements, potentially making other, distant humans our worst potential enemies.
- vardump 3y agoLuckily those same distances ensure that interactions between those worst enemies are practically zero.
- est31 3y agoHumans might evolve tools to lower cultural drift or get it to zero even, which is also needed I think if you want to build galaxy spanning societies, for precisely the reason you state. E.g. you could have many jobs in society be done by machines, have humans be raised by them, interact with them on a daily basis, etc. If you want to prevent language drift, you could have these machines speak only one specific kind of language. That way, all the cultural works of the ancestors are still directly accessible to everyone without translation.
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