My eldest son Nason visited us from Edinburgh last weekend with his four-year-old child, Milo. Apart from loads of cuddles with my grandson there was also an opportunity for Nason to share memories of his own childhood in his grandmother’s home. He showed Milo the brass bed warmer on the wall at the front entrance of the bungalow and lifted the lid to show the tiny knitted mouse hidden inside. It has been there for over many decades and on occasional visits I catch my almost forty-year son checking its contents to check the mouse is still there. We all have those homecoming rituals that ground us with a younger version of ourselves. Another memory was conjured up by a Reader’s Digest book called Mysteries of the Unexplained.
My son remembered being quite scared by its contents when a child. Things like human spontaneous combustion were covered along with a photograph of a burnt figure seated on a sofa along with other weird happenings. No wonder it quite mesmerised and frightened him in equal measure. After my visitors left I happened to flick through the book and it did indeed have a Ripley’s Oddities feel to it.
There was a section on the Dogon people of Southern Mali in West Africa who passed on, through their oral traditions, information on astronomical details of the Sirius star that seemed incredibly precise in terms of details for a simple tribal people.
According to French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who worked on field missions during the 1930s and 1940s the Dogons had their own ancient knowledge of astronomy and believed that Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, had a twin star (which is invisible to the naked eye) and that it had an elliptical orbit with Sirius A at its focus and took 50 years to complete its orbit. This second star was said to be white in colour. In fact, in their tradition, there was even a third star in the system even smaller than the other two which had a single satellite orbiting it.
Being the brightest star in the sky Sirius A has long played a powerful role on earth throughout history. The star is twice the size and 25 times as luminous as our Sun it is certainly noticeable. The heliacal rising of Sirius marked the flooding of the Nile in Ancient Egypt and was equally important for ancient Greeks, even the Polynesians, in the Southern Hemisphere, used this star as an important reference for their navigation around the Pacific Ocean.
This Reader's Digest book was published in 1982 so it prompted me to do a little research on what modern astronomy has to say about all this. I was curious about what had been discovered since and how this compared with the Dogon’s tales. Sirius is a twin (binary) star consisting of a main-sequence star of Sirius A, and a faint white dwarf companion termed Sirius B. The mass of the dwarf star Sirius B was only calculated in 2005 by the Hubble Telescope. The distance between the two varies between 8.2 and 31.5 astronomical units as they complete orbit every 50 years. So far so good and remarkably in tune with the Dogon oral tales.
In a letter dated 10 August 1844, the German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel had reasoned from changes in the proper motion of Sirius that it had an unseen companion. Eighteen years later an American telescope-maker and astronomer Alvan Graham Clark was the first to successfully observe the faint companion, Sirius B which was a white dwarf star. Fascinating to read that since 1894, some apparent orbital irregularities in the Sirius system have been observed, indicating the possibility of a third very small companion star, but this has never been confirmed.
By now you will be pretty impressed with the accuracy of the Dogon people and their traditions. However, there could be other interpretations. There is some speculation that Marcel Griaule’s accounts may be flawed as his observations were not borne out by other researchers. In Griale’s accounts the Dogon people indicated that their information was passed on by half-fish and half-human creatures which feels slightly far-fetched. Also, information on astronomical data on Sirius B could have been conveyed to the Dogon people during 5 weeks in 1893 when French astronomers travelled to the region to observe a solar eclipse on 16 April of that year. Who knows, but how impressive would it be if a third star was found? At present the scientific opinion is that Sirius is a twin star system and some fascinating details already known about this star system blew me away.
Sirius is expected to increase in brightness slightly over the next 60, 000 years to reach a peak magnitude and around the year 66, 270 CE Sirius will take its turn as the southern Pole Star. After that date, it will become fainter, but it will continue to be the brightest star in the Earth's night sky for approximately the next 210,000 years, then Vega, another A-type star becomes the brightest star. The time scale blows the mind as does the magnitude of a starry sky at night. Perhaps on a fundamental level, these star-filled skies are there to remind us of the wonders of this world we live in.
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.
Og Mandino
