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Has a Biochem Undergrad Solved a Cosmic Radiation Mystery?
scibri writes "A few weeks ago, reports of a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in Japanese tree rings corresponding to the year 775 intrigued astronomers. Such a spike could only have been caused by a massive supernova or solar flare, but there was no evidence of either of these at that time. Until Jonathon Allen, a biochem undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, Googled it. He found a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to a 'red crucifix' appearing in the sky in 774, and speculates that it could have been a supernova hidden behind a cloud of dust, which could mask the remnants of the exploded star from astronomers today."
Holy crap!
Uggghhh, the linked article only has some lame text, written in some script I can't decypher, in a language I cannot understand. Scholarship is too hard!
Pics or it didn't happen.
[tongue in cheek]
Centuries later, scientists figure out what actually happened using careful observation. Number of times this has happened: too many to count.
This was news like a month ago. If it weren't a horrible nightmare to find something on your failbook wall I could find the discussion we had about it there then.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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Is there also a mysterious layer of ash for the year 793? That year the chronicle has "fiery dragons flying across the firmament".
A.D. 774. This year the Northumbrians banished their king, Alred, from York at Easter-tide; and chose Ethelred, the son of Mull, for their lord, who reigned four winters. This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset; the Mercians and the men of Kent fought at Otford; and wonderful serpents were seen in the land of the South-Saxons.
http://omacl.org/Anglo/part2.html
Twas' a comment by JustOk.
Now this undergrad needs to get funding to track the source article down in it's original form and have it authenticated and cross verified with other ancient works. He will also need several other undergrads to cross check his work, several hours of super computer time or better their own workstations, also the usual funding for a trip (I mean "conference") of three weeks in the Bahamas to discuss all this with his peers after he writes the paper up and has it submitted to the proper journals to have the proper peer review that noone can afford to read in the correct publications. I figure 2 to 3 million dollars should do it. After all this could be the tiny spark of evidence as why reading tree rings and it's tree ring data should not or should be included in figuring out how Global Warming going back then and now, and how the whole normalizing of the tree ring data should be rethought! Micheal Mann should be all over this!
Man, sciencing is so much easier these days.
> carbon-14 spike in Japan in the year 775 suddenly appeared two weeks ago
Lemme guess: Earthquake --> tsunami --> meltdown --> time portal dumping radiation "somewhere"
Jackasses! >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
He proposed an explanation more plausible than people before.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
That these days our understanding of the past can be improved just by increased aggregation of existing data.
Srsly... Just Google it.
This could not have been caused by a supernova. A supernova would have affected almost the entire planet, not just Japan.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Interesting to me, is that in the linked article there is a slashdot comment with the "red crucifix" text discussed in this article.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2893343&cid=40208359
The podcast that the student listened to was produced on June 7 and the slashdot comment was June 4. Hmm... to think user JustOK could have been in Nature.
"The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped by 1.2% over the course of no longer than a year, about 20 times more than the normal rate of variation"
Does this mean that new supernova contributed 1.2% of radiation of all stars, including Sun? Does Sun contribute to Carbon 14 contents in tree rings?
Were similar tree ring changes has been detected during known supernova events in history?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Time to look for a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels corresponding to the year 0.
I didn't get way into physics in high school but I was interested. Hearing this explanation confuses me so there are probably more people than me who are wondering this. How exactly can cosmics radiation can cause carbon atoms in the atmosphere to gain neutrons? No new carbon is being formed, obviously, so existing carbon atoms would have to be turning into carbon-14 and I didn't think it was possible to just slip in another neutrons without basically blowing up the nucleus of any atom. I mean we don't "make" tritium for example by stuffing in more nuetrons magically, we have to sort it out of seawater. I would bet I could randomly throw my mouse and hit 3 physicists here at slashdot so could someone explain what the correlation between supernovas and carbon 14 is?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318649/
It's funny the movie had something like this in it. I don't want to do any spoiler of the movie
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Google existed in 774??
Dragons!!!
No.
Is there also a mysterious layer of ash for the year 793? That year the chronicle has "fiery dragons flying across the firmament".
And how might the people of that time and place describe near-miss asteroids that enter the atmosphere but do not impact the earth?
Perhaps the word "dragon" was not meant to be taken literally and was merely used as a metaphor, a literary device?
That would explain the "wonderful serpents" ...
I guess we can mark that UFC off the list. Next please.
This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset;
I'm a little dubious that a supernova, even one visible only in the west after sunset, would be described as a red crucifix. In astronomical photos stars look like crosses, but that's an artifact of the telescope optics, which they didn't have in the dark ages. A supernova just wouldn't look like a cross.
On the other hand, I doubt it's aurora. Since England is pretty far north, and they didn't have artificial lights at night, they would see aurora far more often than we do now, and it just wouldn't rate such a mention. (Besides, an auroral manifestation in the shape of a cross? Dubious.)
A sun pillar plus a layer of clouds would make a crucifix, though. I'll go with that as my most-likely explanation.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/06/04/1147201/what-struck-earth-in-775
http://omacl.org/Anglo/part2.html
And I'm sure other scientists had considered that same hypothesis before anyone here. Scientists, shame on you: your field is every more fucked up.
Dragons!!!
That would explain the "wonderful serpents" ...
If you just read down a few years:
"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."
(from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : Eighth Century)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
He found a reference in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to a 'red crucifix' appearing in the sky in 774
Idiots! For the love of..., tell us the reference!
There is danger in conducting a search for what you expect to see because you WILL find what your looking for if you look hard enough.
What separates real scientists from crackpots is what you do next after you get a hit.
Depends on the calendar system in use whether or not this is true; there is a year 0 in many calendar systems.
Actually, in both the major calendar systems that refer to a year "Before Christ" (B.C.), the years in the other direction are "Anno Domini" (or, in English, "Year of Our Lord"), not "after Christ".
The practice parallels the practice of numbering years within (not after) the reign of a particular monarch.
But, each of those calendars also has a widely used modern calendar whose year 0 corresponds the year 1 B.C. on the corresponding calendar system. (ISO 8601 year 0 is proleptic Gregorian year 1 B.C., whereas astronomical year 0 is Julian year 1 B.C.)
Also, a number of calendar systems that are unrelated to the Julian and Gregorian systems have a year 0; e.g., the Buddhist and Hindu calendar systems have a year 0, because they are based on an elapsed year count from the epoch point rather than an ordinal year number during a defined era.
We could always travel 1250 Light-years out, and observe the event again...
Let me see, cosmic Japanese radiation and giant crosses in the sky?
First thing that comes to mind was the anime Evangelion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion_(anime)
Did the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle look something like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eva_cross_explosion.png
AD 774 is under Dai Zong of Tang's reign, see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emperors_of_the_Tang_Dynasty
The Book of Tang, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Tang, in one of its volumes, records in excruciating details of astronomical observations of positions of various stars and events such as sighting of comets, of each month of each emperor. I looked at the section for AD 773-775 and didn't find any mention of anything 'red' or extraordinary.
In those days, the earth was still stationary in the centre of the universe. Under those conditions astronomical phenomena may have only been visible from some parts of the earth and not others.
They just don't write history like that any more!
I looked into the literature on supernovas and carbon-14 and found this: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690024196_1969024196.pdf also see: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469(1964)021%3C0134%3APOCBSP%3E2.0.CO%3B2
The 775 C-14 spike is 20 times the normal level. According to this paper the closest recent supernova (the Crab Nebula supernova in 1054) was only capable of producing a spike 8% more than normal.
To get a 2000% increase over normal you need a supernova 16 times closer, about 400 light years away, and 250 times brighter than 1054. The angular diameter of such a remnant today would be larger than the full moon, it seems unlikely that there are any dense dust clouds of this visible size for an object like this to hide behind. An obscure reference in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle does no a credible supernova make.
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