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Astronomers Detect Mysterious Radio Signals Coming From Outside Our Galaxy (sciencealert.com)
This week the New York Post reported on "powerful radio signals which have been detected repeatedly in the same exact location in space," generating as much energy as the sun does in a whole day, in "the only known instance in which these signals have been found twice in the same location in space." Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes Science Alert:
Back in March, scientists detected 10 powerful bursts of radio signals coming from the same location in space. And now researchers have just picked up six more of the signals seemingly emanating from the same region, far beyond our Milky Way... Currently, the leading hypothesis for the source of the Milky Way's FRB is the cataclysmic collision of two neutron stars, which forms a black hole. The idea is that as this collision happens, huge amounts of short-lived radio energy are blasted out into space. But the repeating nature of these distant signals, all coming from the same place, suggest that can't be the case... the most likely hypothesis at the moment for these outer-galactic FRB is that they're coming from an exotic object such as a young neutron star, that's rotating with enough power to regularly emit the extremely bright pulses.
But the New York Post thinks it's aliens.
But the New York Post thinks it's aliens.
"generating as much energy as the sun does in a whole day"
Over what span of time is generating this energy that the sun does 'in a whole day'? Seconds? A day? A year? It's a meaningless statement otherwise, giving no hint of the power of the signal.
I yearn for a time someone with a basic grounding in science was writing these summaries, for which the above would stand out like a sore thumb.
My guess is it's a precessing pulsar with an offset magnetic field. Pulsars are well known to produce repeating pulses as their magnetic poles rotate in and out of view. To see the pulses requires they cross our field of view, meaning a specific alignment of the rotation axis vs location of the magnetic pole (which don't have to be the same). If there is a second body near the pulsar, with an orbit offset from the equator, it would cause the rotation axis to precess, just like the Earth's does due to the Moon and Sun. Therefore the alignment of the magnetic pole would move in and out of view, and we only see pulses on the rare occasions they line up just right.
This guess would be defeated if the pulses look nothing like normal ones from pulsars, and confirmed if enough data is collected to detect the orbital motion of a second body.
Flavius Josephus wrote about Jesus twice in 93.
1) First off, it was 60 years after his death, so he could not have seen or known Jesus personally.
2) Even worse, the writings by Josephus are now widely recognized as fake, that is, they're forgeries:
http://www.richardcarrier.info...:
In the TF, both grammatically and thematically, the] responsibility for the death of Jesus lies with Josephus’s fellow-countrymen, the Jews, not with the Romans, and in this too the Testimonium is hard to reconcile with Josephus’s denunciation of Pilate’s crimes against the Jews. The Josephus of the Testimonium is represented as aligning himself with the Christians (versus the Jews) and admitting that the blame for the crucifixion of Jesus the Messiah lies with the Jews; it need hardly be said that such an admission on Josephus’s part is inconceivable.
Wikipedia:
Many Christian apologists cite Josephus to attempt to argue that even the "pagan"/Jewish/etc. Josephus acknowledged Jesus as a savior/miracleworker/etc., and that one should therefore believe in Jesus' divinity. However, citing Josephus as a source on Jesus argument has numerous flaws. For some reason these facts almost always come as a surprise to Christians who cite him. It's almost as if they just look up quotes without any understanding of what constitutes valid sources for determining historical events.
In Book 18, Chapter 3, Paragraph 3 of the Antiquities of the Jews (written ca. 93-94 CE), Josephus writes (Whiston’s translation):[2][3]
Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works — a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal man amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day.
Is the Testimonium Flavianum authentic? There are several reasons to think not:
Scholarly consensus: Most scholars admit that at least some parts, if not all, of this paragraph cannot be authentic,[4][5] and some are convinced that the entire paragraph is an interpolation inserted by Christians at a later time.[6][7] Even Christian scholars consider the paragraph to be an overenthusiastic forgery,[8][9][10] and even the Catholic Encyclopedia concurs.[11]
Context: This paragraph breaks the flow of the chapter. Book 18 (“Containing the interval of 32 years from the banishment of Archelus to the departure from Babylon”) starts with the Roman taxation under Cyrenius in 6 CE and discusses various Jewish sects at the time, including the Essenes and a sect of Judas the Galilean, to which he devotes three times more space than to Jesus; Herod’s building of various cities, the succession of priests and procurators, and so on. Chapter 3 starts with sedition against Pilate, who planned to slaughter all the Jews but changed his mind. Pilate then used sacred money to supply water to Jerusalem. The Jews protested; Pilate sent spies into Jewish ranks with concealed weapons, and there was a great massacre. Then in the middle of all these troubles comes the curiously quiet paragraph about Jesus, followed immediately by: “And about the same time another terrible misfortune confounded the Jews ...” Josephus would not have thought the Christian story to be “another terrible misfortune.” It is only a Christian (someone like Eusebius) who might have considered Jesus to be a Jewish tragedy. Paragraph three can be lift
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Jesus never existed.
Let me start with saying that I have no personal stake in whether or not Jesus was a historical figure. I don't really care about the historicity. However, I DO care about the validity of historical arguments, and you're making a statement here with certainty that is completely unjustified.
Basically, rather than objectively evaluating the evidence, you're stacking the deck unfairly against the other side. The reality is that there isn't really a way to CONFIRM the existence of Jesus after 2000 years, but using criteria applied to other historical figures from that era, Jesus has a stronger than average case for historicity. What that means is that if you're going to apply your same criteria for discounting Jesus to other historical figures, be prepared to throw out around 1/3 of the text of most textbooks with titles like "Ancient History," along with hundreds of other historical figures that we don't commonly doubt the historicity of.
There are absolutely no contemporaneous accounts that speak of Jesus. Not a single one. As far as the historical record is concerned he just did not exist. There's not a single carving, sculpture, poem, painting, drawing or mention of him from the time in which he supposedly lived.
Please reference the fraction of non-elite persons in a non-central Roman province that have such contemporaneous records at that time. Writers, aristocrats, and government officials have records of their existence. Not children of carpenters. And even for elite folks, the details are often quite sketchy and we often have to interpolate information from historians who wrote of these events a century or two later.
There is not a single mention in him in military records or dispatches back to Rome (and surely anyone who could command huge gatherings of people in a potentially disruptive province should be of interest). He is not mentioned in the records of Herodâ(TM)s court nor is he mentioned in the records of the Temple or by any Priests.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you have any sense of the small number of such records that exist today? There are no detailed accounts of "Herod's court" nor any detailed extant "records of the Temple" or writings of contemporary priests. These sorts of records simply don't exist today for the most part, and the few that do exist are incredibly fragmentary. It's not like we have some sort of "daily log" of events for Roman soldiers and "happenings at the Court and at Temple." (And we do have a number of possible references in the Talmud, though there's a lot that's unclear there.)
Surely if he was believed by some to be a prophet and others to be a false prophet some mention of the ruckus he was causing in Judean civic and religious society should have been recorded.
Unless his "ruckus" wasn't as notable as you think. We DO have evidence that there were a number of claimants of "false messiahs" who went around Judea during that era. We don't really know much about most of them, because why would we about some guy who was followed around by a small group of people who mostly did NOT "cause a ruckus" at first (recall that Jesus's message, at least as recorded, was mostly peaceful).
Anyhow, as for records aside from the Bible, there are several. First, you have Josephus, and your other reply to another post is either ill-informed or disingenuous, because while there ARE likely forgeries in Josephus (notably the Testamonim Flavianum), there are other passages that most historians accept as very likely to be genuine.
Then you have Tacitus, one of the MOST respect