A nearly 3,000-year-old stone disk covered in mysterious patterns is actually an ancient celestial map marking the brightest stars in the night sky, researchers claim.
A tire-sized stone discovered several years ago near an ancient hill fortress in northeastern Italy has 29 inscriptions carved into its front and back that could represent the brightest stars in the night sky. researchers make the claim in a new study published. Published in this magazine on November 22nd Astronomical memo.
However, astronomers Ed KruppThe director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the stone’s discovery, told Live Science that the association between the markings on the stone and the brightest star could be a coincidence.
“Could these marks represent asterisms? Possibly,” he said. But “does this paper make a convincing case? No, it doesn’t.”
Krupp is the author of a study expected to be published in the coming months that examines previous efforts to identify asterisms in rock art. He is also the author of “.Echoes of ancient skies: Astronomy of lost civilizations” (Dover, 2003).
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ancient stone
The stone disc is one of two found near the entrance to the hill fortress of Lupine Piccolo near Trieste, and one source says it is probably in a cemetery. 2022 survey announced their findings. A similar pair was also found about 100 kilometers south, near Gradina in the Brijuni Islands off the coast of Croatia.
These forts date back to the area’s ‘protohistoric’ period, between 1800 BC and 400 BC, the transition period between prehistoric and historical times. However, the authors of the latest study note that the stone disc may have been created later.
One of the lupinepiccolo stones is blank, and researchers suggest it may have represented the sun.
They also suggest that 28 of the marks on the front and back sides of the other stone disc correspond to prominent bright stars, particularly those in the constellations Scorpius and Orion. These stars would have risen in the eastern sky just before the sun rose at that time. Time — a phenomenon known as “helical rising.”
Astronomer paolo molaro The lead author of the latest study, a doctor from the Observatory of Trieste, told Live Science: Statistical precision, scale, directionality The imprints were evidence that they represented real stars in the sky.
he, greek poet hesiodWritten in the 8th century B.C. spiral rising star pattern Like Orion and the Pleiades, it determines when to plant crops.
“This practice probably spread to primitive communities long before that,” he says. “This suggests that this stone may have been some kind of calendar.”
mystery star
The study does not explain the mysterious 29th mark carved into the surface of the stone disc, said to represent the constellation Orion, which does not correspond to a known star. However, there are several possibilities as to what it represents.
Most interesting is the idea that the 29th mark may depict a supernova that was visible when the disk was created but later disappeared. And a black hole or supernova remnant could still be there today, Molaro said.
Little is known about the culture of the Castellieri, a Bronze Age people who built more than 100 hill forts in the ancient Istrian region of northeastern Adriatic Sea. And the accuracy of the star map is amazing, he said.
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“In this case, the reconstruction is astronomically faithful,” he said. “Therefore, the comparison is [star] catalog of [Greek astronomer] Hipparchus, 2nd century BC
wishful thinking
But Krupp disagrees that the stone is a celestial calendar. “To me, this paper is an over-the-top argument, suggesting the possibility of a hypothetical supernova explosion,” he said. “Statistical arguments suggest that something exists that doesn’t seem to exist, and that’s what can happen in such an analysis.”
Many such objects could be attempts at star mapping, he said, but such claims require clear evidence.
“We need more than similar patterns,” he says. “We are pattern-seeking creatures, but we are not always rigorous in our efforts to determine whether the patterns we see make sense.”
Krupp said he was nevertheless impressed by the professional discipline and analysis in the previous study.
“I don’t dispute the seriousness of the author’s intentions,” he said. “But I think the possibility of celestial representations in the chisel marks was too appealing to them.”
He also said that to be fully convincing, there needs to be a clearer connection between these ancient traces and the night sky. “We do not claim that representations of prehistoric asterisms need to be perfect; many known representations of star patterns are not,” he says.
“But most of the time, in the absence of a convincing independent and convergent body of evidence, there is only wishful thinking,” Krupp said. “This is wishful thinking.”