Ancient Babylonian astronomers calculated Jupiter's position

There is more exciting scientific news this week that corroborates Sitchin writings. Last week we heard new evidence of the existance in our solar system of another large planet, which might be Nibiru. This week Mathieu Ossendrijver published an article in Science magazine about a cuneiform tablet detailing the position of Jupiter based on geometrical calculations by the Babylonians in 350-50 BCE. Europeans were able to do this in the 1400's. Ancient Babylonian astronomers tracked the motion of Jupiter using a technique that historians had thought was invented some 1,400 years later, in Europe. That's according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science by Mathieu Ossendrijver of Humboldt University in Berlin. He has a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but instead of studying the stars, Ossendrijver spends his days poring over crumbling clay tablets, covered with the tiny scrawls of long-dead Babylonian priests. The Babylonians lived before the birth of Christ in what is now Iraq. And they were obsessed with trying to predict the future by watching the stars and planets. In fact, they came up with the idea of astrology as we know it today "with horoscopes, and with the zodiacal signs — the 12 signs," says Ossendrijver. "That was invented in Babylonia." Ossendrijver has been doing a close study of a few hundred cuneiform tablets that deal with the hard-core mathematics of Babylonian astronomy. They date from 400 B.C. to 50 B.C., and they're filled with numbers and arithmetic — except for four mysterious tablets that are different. "Nobody understood what they are about, including me," says Ossendrijver. "I didn't know it until very recently." These tablets talk about a shape: a trapezoid, which is a rectangle with a slanted top. The tablets don't have an actual drawing of a trapezoid, they just talk about its sides and its area, and dividing the area into parts. What exactly were the ancient astronomers doing? Last year, Ossendrijver made a breakthrough. "I found, so to speak, the key to understanding these weird texts that deal with trapezoids," he says. The key was another clay tablet that describes how the planet Jupiter moves across the sky. He noticed that the numbers on this tablet matched the numbers on those strange trapezoid tablets. "So, that was like the 'aha!' moment," he says. Ossendrijver realized that the Babylonian astronomers were using the tools of geometry to deal with a very abstract concept — how the velocity of Jupiter changes over time. Now, historians knew that Babylonians used geometry to work with physical objects — a plot of land, say, or a building. But this is way more sophisticated and modern. In fact, historians had thought this method was invented in 14th century Europe. The discovery has wowed scholars like Alexander Jones at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. "It's a kind of a tour de force, teasing out the meaning from these sources," says Jones, "and what he's found is really quite remarkable." The person reading the tablet to make astronomical calculations is supposed to imagine a figure in which one dimension is distance traveled per day and the other dimension is time, says Jones. "I'm quite surprised," Jones says, but then added, "I'm not surprised that this is coming out of Babylonia, because these astronomer-scribes of the last five centuries B.C. or so really were amazing." Noel Swerdlow, a researcher at Caltech who studies the history of astronomy, says the analysis of these tablets appears to be correct. But he also wasn't at all surprised to learn that the Babylonians could do this. "They were very, very smart, and the more we learn of what they did, the more impressive, the more remarkable it becomes," Swerdlow told NPR by email. Of course these priests wanted to track Jupiter to understand the will of their god Marduk, to be able to do things like predict future grain harvests. Nonetheless, says Jones, they had the insight to see that the same math used for working with mundane stuff like land use could be applied to the motions of celestial objects. "They're in a way like modern scientists and in a way they're very different," says Jones. "But they're still coming up with things that we can recognize as being like what we value as mathematics and science."

Source: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/351/6272/482.full.pdf

Ninth Planet or Planet X may have been found

The mythical "Planet X" is actually real, and scientists are calling it "Planet Nine." Astronomers have found evidence for a planet 10 times more massive than Earth in the far outer solar system, orbiting about 20 times farther from the sun than distant Neptune does. "This would be a real ninth planet," one of the researchers, Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in a statement. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting." [Evidence Mounts for Existence of 'Planet X' (Video)]

This potential "Planet Nine" has not yet been observed. But Brown and his colleague, Konstantin Batygin, also of Caltech, are inferring its likely existence based on modeling work and the weird orbits of a number of small objects in the faraway Kuiper Belt, which lies beyond Neptune. Specifically, six Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cruise around the sun on elliptical paths that all point in the same direction, even though the bodies are moving at different speeds. In addition, the six KBOs' orbits all share the same tilt — roughly 30 degrees downward, relative to the plane of the eight officially recognized planets. (Pluto, which was the ninth planet until its 2006 reclassification by the International Astronomical Union, zips around the sun in a different plane.)

Zecharia Sitchin was an Azerbaijani-born American author of books promoting an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributes the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he states was a race of extra-terrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He believed this hypothetical planet of Nibiru to be in an elongated, elliptical orbit in the Earth's own Solar System, asserting that Sumerian mythology reflects this view. Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 26 languages http://www.sitchin.com

Liquid water flows on Mars

NASA has announced that it has discovered evidence of flowing liquid salt water on Mars during the Red Planet’s summer months, in what is the biggest indication to date that the planet either has already supported life, or can support life in the future. The discovery comes thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its imaging spectrometer, which enabled researchers to find telltale signs of hydrated minerals on streaked-looking slopes. Needless to say, this could change both the course of planetary science and the search for life in and beyond our solar system.

Most mysterious about these streaks — which can be as long as a football field — was that they appeared to change in size over time, growing longer during Mars' warm summer months and shrinking during colder seasons

One of the convincing pieces of evidence was that the streaks flow downhill, as shown with red arrows

(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) But what ultimately convinced the team that it was water, instead of another form of liquid, was when they used instruments onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite in orbit around the Red Planet. MRO has an instrument called a spectrometer, which scans the Martian surface and identifies the chemical makeup of what's down there. From these scans, the team identified hydrated salts within the dark streaks. The importance of these salts is that they "would lower the freezing point of a liquid brine, just as salt on roads here on Earth causes ice and snow to melt more rapidly," NASA explained in a press release. Here's a false-color image showing how prevalent these streaks are:

(NASA) The scientists don't know yet where this water is coming from and how much of it exists. "Now that we know what we're looking for, we can begin to better search and look and see if there is an aquifer network supplying these, but that is actually the next step," Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, said during the media briefing.