Grammar in the Script Massive Meteor Outburst in Ad 531
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GRAMMAR IN THE SCRIPT MASSIVE METEOR OUTBURST IN AD 531 POSSIBLY NOTED AT CARACOL, BELIZE by Hutch Kinsman, ([email protected]) The author and astronomer David Asher 1 have performed high-speed computer integrations analyzing years within the Maya Classic Period where outbursts of the Eta Aquariid (ETA) meteor shower may have occurred on or close to specific Long Count dates within those years.2 The Maya may have associated those ETA outbursts with specific events recorded in the hieroglyphic script. Previously there had been no scientific attempts to correlate any meteor showers with any specific dates in the Maya corpus. The most extreme outburst that occurred during the Maya Classic Period (AD 250-909) likely occurred on the morning of April 10, 531, and was actually composed of three separate outbursts whose peaks occurred at local times of 02:42 AM, 03:05 AM and 04:39 AM (08:42 UT, 09:05 UT and 10:39 UT respectively). Four3 days later, on April 14, 9.4.16.13.3, 4 Ak'bal 16 Pohp, the royal accession of K'an I was recorded on Stela 15 at the site of Caracol. History There are no records of ancient peoples in the New World (before contact with the Spanish in the 1500's) recording specific dates of occurrences of meteor showers, unlike cultures such as in China, Korea, Japan or Europe. Hagar (1931) wrote that prior to the Spanish arrival in Mexico, the Mexicans commemorated falling stars or "Tzontemocque or Falling Hairs" with the annual celebration of the festival known as Quecholli. He claimed that the falling figures found in the Borgia and Vaticanus 3773 and other codices represented meteor showers, possibly the Leonids and the Taurids (Vaticanus-3773). In the codex Telleriano-Remensis Köhler noted that the Aztecs recorded a meteor in 1489 on page 39V (2002:4; see also Taube, 2000:287- 290). Trenary found a possible recording of a Leonid shower date, within a few days of 709 October 28, that occurs on Lintel 24 at Yaxchilan by using a one day shift for every 71 years of the Earth's axis precession (1987-1988:112,113). The actual date of that shower may have occurred, however, about 2-3 weeks earlier than October 28 due to the precession additionally of the Leonid orbits themselves (Ahn, 2005). The author found that cognate almanacs in the Dresden and Madrid codices may have 1 Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, UK. 2 Presentation at the 2016 International Meteoroids Conference, European Space Agency, Noordwijk, Netherlands, June 7, 2016; Kinsman and Asher, in press, Planetary and Space Science, abbreviated "in press" as a reference within this paper). 3 April 14 corresponds to a correlation constant of 584286; although a correlation constant of 584283 would mean the accession occurred on April 11, one day following the outburst, other data compiled so far by the authors favor 584286 (Martin and Skidmore [2012], Kennett et al. [2013]); all dates are in the Julian Calendar. 26 recorded outbursts of the Perseid meteor shower in AD 933 and 775 (2014b:98, Figure 5). Since the Maya (and other New World cultures) seemed to have been concerned with astronomical events within our solar system that focused on the Sun, Moon and planets that affected crucial activities such as agriculture and religious rites (see for instance Milbrath, 1999:Chapters 1-6; Aveni, 2001), there is very little information in ancient Maya literature concerning sidereal--relative to the stars-- issues such as the zodiac, comets, supernovae, meteors and meteor showers (for example see Milbrath, 1999:249-293, Chaper 7; Aveni, 2001:82-91, 95, 200-205). Methodology There are four named4 meteor showers seen today that were likely observed during the Maya Classic Period: the Lyrids, Eta Aquariids, Orionids and Perseids (see Kinsman, 2014b:91, 92, Figure 4); of these four, the Eta Aquariids presents itself as a productive shower for investigation due to the close proximity of its parent Comet Halley to Earth’s orbit during the mid-Classic period (see Figure 1) and the fact that Halley’s orbital parameters are well known back to 1404 BC (Yeomans and Kiang, 1981). Several of Comet Halley’s immediate orbits after perihelion (point of closest passage to Sun) previous to and around AD 530 passed very close to Earth's orbit (known as the descending node, where on the downward path the comet cuts through the plane of Earth’s orbit). When Halley is close to Earth’s orbit, it follows that the stream of particles ejected by Halley will also be close to Earth’s orbit, as described below. That the stream of ejected particles is immediately close to the Earth’s orbit is conducive to particles having a good chance of impacting Earth, as our model shows (in press). Halley passes outside of Earth's orbit by about 0.3 au5 at the ascending node (where the comet’s upward path cuts through plane of the Earth's orbit) on its way toward perihelion. See figure one. 4 Annual showers recorded in ancient literature and possibly observed during the Classic Period however apparently not seen today are numbered in Jenniskens (2006:598-611, Table 1) and lettered in Imoto and Hasegawa (1958:134-140, Tables 1 and 2). 5 One au, known as an "Astronomical Unit" is the average distance of the Earth to the Sun, about 150,000,000 kilometers. 27 Figure 1. Orbit of Comet Halley in AD 530 (courtesy of D. J. Asher). Particles of the parent comet stream off when the comet approaches and is heated by the sun: in our model particles (which become meteoroids6) were ejected in the positive and negative tangential directions at the time of perihelion passage. Knowing the exact time that the particles are ejected is critical to the accurate results of the model of the resulting meteoroid stream; to this end, the orbits for the time of Halley's (known as comet 1P) perihelion passage were extracted from Yeomans and Kiang, who use a combination of ancient Chinese observations and computer-corrected observations (1981: table 4) to determine the time and distance of each of Halley’s passages. After ejection, the particles then generally follow the same orbit as that of the comet; individual particles are subjected to continuing gravitational effects (perturbations) of all eight planets and radiation pressure of the sun; initial positions of eight planets were obtained from JPL Horizons (Giorgini et al., 1996). The computations used the RADAU algorithm (Everhart, 1985) implemented in the MERCURY integrator7 (Chambers, 1999). 6 meteoroids--particles in space prior to entering Earth's atmosphere, at which time they are known as meteors. 7 The integrator program (the Mercury package) is designed to solve problems in orbital mechanics involving the gravitational forces of massive bodies such as the Sun, planets and much smaller bodies such as comets, asteroids and meteoroids; the algorithm (RADAU in our case) resolves how dynamical steps are utilized in these computations. 28 After ejection particles begin as a cluster and then gradually spread out due to differential initial particle ejection speeds8 as the number of orbits of the cluster increase (Asher, D. J., 2000:11,12, figure 4; McNaught and Asher, 1999:92). Therefore, under normal conditions, the previous revolutions of the comet most recent to the year of examination can produce the densest cluster of particles and thus the most intense outbursts. The greater the number of orbits of the cluster of particles, the more the particles spread out, and thus the lower the intensity of an outburst as the particles spread out during an intercept with Earth. Occasionally, however, particles get trapped in clusters for upwards of a few thousand years in a condition known as resonance (discussed further in a future article) and thus an outburst of meteors may easily occur in the Classic Period due to a passage of Halley as far back as 1404 BC9 or even earlier. The critical parameters for producing an outburst are measured in 3-dimensional space (Asher, 2000; McNaught and Asher, 1999) and are: (1) the distance from the Sun of the particle cluster when passing through Earth's orbital plane (ecliptic) compared to the distance of the Earth from the Sun (miss distance—the closer to zero, the more intense the outburst) measured in astronomical units (au), the position of Earth in its orbit equal to the position of the cluster in space along Earth’s orbit (solar longitudes10 are equal), and the cluster of particles in its own orbit intersects the Earth in its orbit (along-trail positioning). The typical process of computation began with choosing a Classic Maya year such as AD 531 where a date had been recorded in the inscriptions during the month of April and then designating a number of orbits that Comet Halley11 would have completed prior to that particular year. For instance three revolutions of the Comet would mean that the Mercury program would initiate the ejection of particles at Halley's perihelion passage in AD 295; four revolutions of the Comet would mean the particles would have been ejected at the passage in AD 218, five revolutions at the passage in 141 and so forth until 26 revolutions of the Comet would mean those particles under examination in 531 would have been ejected in 1404 BC. At our particle ejection speeds (in opposing tangential directions) the size of the orbit (measured as the semi-major axis a of the ellipse, i.e. half of the length of the long axis of the ellipse) of the particles would be up to approximately 3 au smaller and larger than Halley's orbit (about 18 au, the approximate length of the semi-major axis).