Stonehenge Decoded??

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:47:22 GMT

'Stonehenge Decoded' aired last Sunday night on the History Channel and the British archaeologist seems to think he has figured out why Stonehenge was built. It was built as an ancient cemetery where twice a year the ancient people gathered to proceed in rituals of ancestry worship. Whatever you call it, it appears to be ancient re-incarnation in its finest form, yet it's constantly referred to as ancestry worship in the academic community.

To give a bit of a critique to this documentary, let's begin at the sole purpose of the proposed documentary, to decode Stonehenge, yet many of us are still asking the question, just who built Stonehenge and why didn't this documentary focus more on how the stones came there to begin with? Archaeology is nothing more than theories based on evidence found in the field, so we find the evidence we are looking for and we interpret it the way we see it. There will always be the human factor and the human element to our view of archaeology or of the possibility of life on other planets. Carl Sagan was very aware of the human factor or bias when viewing our past or the potential of life elsewhere in the universe. No matter how scientific, we always interpret the way we see, from our human view point and our personal biases and conditioning we have received during the course of our lifetimes.

Haven't we heard all this before? As a matter of fact...

So why all the hubbub by "The History Channel" to create a documentary titled 'Stonehenge Decoded"? We'd much rather see a documentary concerning the work by noted archaeologist Dennis Price who believes the lost city of Apollo is located at King's Barrow Ridge overlooking Stonehenge. What happened to that story?

Milky Way Galaxy May Have HiddenTwin

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:25:46 GMT

A large galaxy could be lurking unseen in our own cosmic backyard, a pair of researchers says. Such a massive object could explain a mysterious gravitational pull on the Milky Way.

Astronomers know both the direction and speed of the Milky Way's motion based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background – radiation that filled all space shortly after the big bang. The wavelength of this radiation appears slightly shorter in the direction of the Milky Way's motion because of the Doppler effect.

This motion is thought to be due to the gravitational pull from surrounding galaxies and clusters of galaxies. But when the influence of all known galaxies and galaxy clusters is added up, the Milky Way's actual motion is off by about 20°.

Now, new calculations suggest that the discrepancy may be due to a large galaxy hidden right on our cosmic doorstep, or a hidden cluster of galaxies somewhat farther away in the same direction. The calculations were made by Avi Loeb and Ramesh Narayan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US.

Massive neighbour

They used data from the 2 Micron Redshift Survey (2MRS) to calculate how the Milky Way should be moving if it were affected only by the galaxies observed in that survey. Then they compared that to how our galaxy actually is moving based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background.

They found that our galaxy has an extra motion of 120 kilometres per second in roughly the direction of our galaxy's centre as seen from Earth.

They found that a galaxy slightly more massive than our own could account for the motion if it were located about 3 million light years away behind our galaxy's centre. This would make it our most massive neighbour, aside from the Andromeda galaxy, which has a similar mass and is about 2.5 million light years from Earth.

Dust veil

Such a large, nearby galaxy could have remained hidden until now because of the thick dust that obscures the sky in the direction of the galactic centre, the researchers say.

Another possibility is that the extra pull is due to a large cluster of thousands of galaxies lying about 70 million light years from Earth in the same direction and obscured for the same reason. Alternatively, a combination of individual galaxies and galaxy clusters in this direction could be responsible, Loeb says.

"We are ignorant about our immediate neighbourhood behind the Milky Way," he told New Scientist. "If we wait 100 million years, the Sun will go to the other side of the galaxy and then we can see what's on the other side. But that's a long time to wait – we want to know before that." Radio surveys could penetrate the dust and reveal galaxies behind the galaxy's centre, he says.

Pirin Erdogdu of Nottingham University in the UK, who led a similar study published in 2006, says X-ray surveys would already have spotted a cluster of galaxies like the one Loeb and Narayan suggest, ruling out that option.

Distant pull

But she says it would be possible for a large individual galaxy to hide behind the dust. "There could be a nearby … spiral or even a mid-sized elliptical galaxy, which are generally much bigger, within say 10° of the galactic centre [that] we do not know about," she told New Scientist.

But she says it is very difficult to make a firm conclusion about any hidden galaxies from Loeb and Narayan's study, which only considered objects within 400 million light years of our galaxy. Mass concentrations beyond this distance are likely to have a significant influence on our galaxy's motion as well, she says.

Brent Tully of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, US, agrees. He thinks the extra motion Loeb and Narayan describe may be due to a supercluster of galaxies containing more than 10,000 times as much mass as the Milky Way called the Shapley concentration.

It lies about 700 million light years from Earth in a part of the sky about 40° from our galaxy's centre. "We are unlikely to be missing an important local attractor," he told New Scientist.

Event Horizon

Stonehenge Decoded??

Milky Way Galaxy May Have HiddenTwin