Related papers: Cometary records revise Eastern Mediterranean chro…
The study examines the palaeoclimatic background and the regional manifestations of the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Byzantine Empire, but also including neighbouring polities. It explores the…
From his observations of the A.D. 1572 super-nova and the A.D. 1577 comet, Tycho Brahe concluded that such transient celestial objects are outside the Earth's atmosphere, and he quoted the 9th century A.D. Persian astrologer and astronomer…
At present it is considered that Christianity was declared a state religion in Georgia in circa 326 AD, during the reign of King Mirian and Queen Nana. In the Georgian Chronicle [1] (Kaukhchishvili, 1955) it is stated that this event is…
In the context of the recently proposed contact-binary model (Sekanina 2021), I investigate the circumstances of the first perihelion passage of the Kreutz sungrazers in orbits with barycentric periods near 735 yr, following the initial…
Neptune was telescopically discovered by Johan Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in Berlin on 23 September 1846 based on the prediction by Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier. The role German astronomers played in the discovery has…
The recently shown two premises (Gurzadyan 2000), i.e. the absence of 56/64 year Venus cycle constraints, at the importance of the 8-year cycle in the Venus Tablet, stimulated new studies on the Chronology of the Ancient Near East (2nd…
We suggest an earlier date for the accession of the pharaoh Akhenaten of the New Kingdom in Egypt. His first year of reign would be placed in 1382 BCE. This conjecture is based on the possible witness of three annular eclipses of the sun…
A verse in book I of Rigveda mentions a cosmic tree with rope-like aerial roots held up in the sky. Such an imagery might have ensued from the appearance of a comet having `tree stem' like tail, with branched out portions resembling aerial…
Intersection with the debris of a large (50-100 km) short-period comet during the Upper Palaeolithic provides a satisfactory explanation for the catastrophe of celestial origin which has been postulated to have occurred around 12900 BP, and…
New insights into the history of C/1843 D1 and C/1882 R1, the two celebrated Kreutz sungrazers, are provided by assessing evidence on their appearance at the previous perihelion return, known as X/1106 C1 and the Chinese comet of 1138 (Ho's…
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
We examine the rise and sudden demise of comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) on its approach to perihelion. Discovered inbound at 4.2 AU, this long-period comet was predicted to become very bright when near perihelion, at 0.48 AU on 2011 September 10.…
For many decades scholars converse how to correctly include the Old Babylonian Empire into the absolute timeline of history. A cuneiform text from the series Enuma Anu Enlil (EAE #20) reports on the destruction of Babylon after a lunar and…
In this study, we apply our previously developed method to investigate ancient transient sightings in order to derive consequences for modern astrophysical problems.We present case studies of three observations of so called 'guest stars' in…
Until the second half of the 19th century, two or more brief appearances of bright comets, such as the ones in 1668 and 1702, alike in aspect and motion, seen with a tail near the Sun, were almost universally believed to be periodic returns…
Defining the processes involved in the technical/cultural shifts from the Late Middle to the Early Upper Palaeolithic in Europe (~50-39 thousand years BP) is one of the most important tasks facing prehistoric studies. In this debate Italy…
It is widely believed that the advance of science in the Islamic world after the mid-fifteenth century A.D. suffered a decline. For the purpose of examining this belief, a manuscript by Qasim ali al-Qayini (ca. A.D.1685) was chosen based on…
A consistent interpretation is provided for Neolithic Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk as well as European Palaeolithic cave art. It appears they all display the same method for recording dates based on precession of the equinoxes, with animal…
We propose a model for the Pleistocene Ice Age, assuming the following scenario: Between 3 Myr and 11.5 kyr BP a Mars-sized object existed which moved in a highly eccentric orbit. Originating from this object, gas clouds with a complex…
No firm evidence has existed that the ancient Maya civilization recorded specific occurrences of meteor showers or outbursts in the corpus of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions. In fact, there has been no evidence of any pre-Hispanic…