Has a Biochem Undergrad Solved a Cosmic Radiation Mystery? 156
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."
Pics (Score:1, Troll)
Pics or it didn't happen.
[tongue in cheek]
Re:Pics (Score:5, Funny)
The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here.
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Or vagina.
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Nope. The letters are Roman, of a modern mode, and the language is that of England (or the U.S. variation thereof), which I will not utter here.
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One again Steve is having masturbation fantasies about fucking elven girls with big tits.
And thanks to you now everybody's doing that. Next time keep your big mouth shut, and maybe we can get some work done.
A few weeks ago in slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
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 [omacl.org]
Twas' a comment by JustOk. [slashdot.org]
Re:A few weeks ago in slashdot... (Score:5, Interesting)
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774 was a very good year. Mozart wrote his Great Mass. The Montgolfier brothers went up in the first hot-air balloon. And England recognized the independence of the United States. No, wait......
Fiery crucifix in the skies of Kent (Score:3)
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
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From the article...
As far back as 1870, he says, John Jeremiah published an article in Nature that referred to the same wording from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Jeremiah proposed then that it might have been an early description of the Northern Lights2.
"Another possible explanation could be an ice-crystal display," adds Olson, noting that the red "crucifix" could have been formed by sunset light illuminating high-altitude ice particles in both vertical and horizontal bands of light.
But, it could also have been a previously unrecognized supernova. Plenty of supernovae now known to astronomers "are simply missing" in the historical record, says Gyuk. "The sky is a large place and the historical record is not very good."
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Since I can't mod you +6... what blows my mind is this was the only informative comment by JustOK that I could quickly find. Most are just +5 Funny.
This is one of the few remaining reasons I visit slashdot - the rare insightful comment, and the inevitable up-moderation it gets. And of course the meta-hive-mind, where someone much like yourself makes a connection. In a way, it's the closest I can get to James Burke's Connections article in Scientific American.
If only more people would meta-mod, just to ke
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It reminded me very much of Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach.
(By the way... getting that umlaut right reminds me that Slashdot is still in the Web stone age... they don't even support UTF-8 yet. Evidence seems to indicate that the server-side code for Slashdot is Perl! Good Grid, how backwoods can a web developer get?)
(Yet another note: I just had an interesting episode with builtwith.com, and they say the HTML on Slashdot is
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meteors falling from the sky?
Re:A few weeks ago in slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
You're simply not going to get a definitive record of a celestial event in 8th century Europe. Records are very scanty, often non-existent. This is so marked that it's led to an entertaining conspiracy theory [wikipedia.org] or two [wikipedia.org] claiming that the early Middle Ages didn't actually exist and were faked at some later date. Back in the real world, there's so little evidence for most things about Anglo-Saxon England that the claim that the people of York chose Ethelred, son of Mull to be their king is almost as suspect as the claim about the wonderful serpents.
So the best you can usually hope for in the English 8th century is a monk somewhere recording events in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (or a Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- there were a few of them made at different times and in different places). The Chronicle doesn't really go for detail. They sum up a year in a few declarative sentences, with no description, so you're never going to get a description of a celestial event, you're going to get a simplfied interpretation of it. This interpretation will be in terms that the monk or the eyewitnesses he got his information from understood. They didn't know anything about supernovas, but he knew about miraculous crosses in the sky, like that which appeared to the future Roman Emperor Constantine during his fighting against his rival Maxentius. So whatever it was that someone saw, it got interpreted as a crucifix.
The point isn't that something definitely appeared in the sky in 774. There's a chance that someone made up the red crucifx, or hallucinated it, or the chronicler lied or garbled a story he heard fifth-hand. But if it did happen, there's no reason to think that there will be better written evidence than a vague line in one copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
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This probably cites the same things as the wikipedia articles, but this was also covered in the Straight Dope.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2992/did-the-middle-ages-not-really-happen [straightdope.com]
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you have never seen the aurora borealis, have you.
Re:A few weeks ago in slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're talking about events 1200 years ago you're not exactly looking for a telescope picture.
There's evidence of a supernova, or possibly something else, from that time period in Japan. So what was it? Well, apparently in the UK they observed some weird shit that could have been a supernova. So it might actually have been a supernova.
Imagine if this was the other way. There was some written european evidence of some weird red thing in the sky in 774. What would tell what that red thing was? a spike in carbon 14 in tree rings from that time period would make 'supernova' a good guess.
It's not really a sciences problem, it's a language problem. Outside of Japan I bet most people didn't really care, and the Japanese didn't have the desire to search through piles of old foreign language documents on the vague guess they might say something that could have caused a carbon 14 spike in 773, 774 or 775. Digitized images and electronic search make that problem easier, and now the question for verification becomes one of finding if there are similar descriptions in other languages for that time period.
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Big ass snakes migrating from Africa?
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I'd consider it credible of -some- event (where said event could range from the consumption of mushrooms to an actual celestial event). Any supporting material (eg: petroglyphs by pre-writing peoples) would be extremely helpful, but ancient sites are not always well-recorded and are frequently poorly-preserved, making that kind of data hard to find.
A supernova? Maybe, but I still see nothing in the evidence to suggest that it was specifically that. I would imagine a GRB within a narrow range of distances co
Funding needed! (Score:5, Funny)
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Micheal Mann should be all over this!
No kidding! [wikipedia.org] Nothing says "non-stop action entertainment" quite like 8th-century tree rings, dude...
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So I'll start an indiegogo page to get the funding [indiegogo.com]...as long as someone else starts a fund [indiegogo.com] for me because I did good by starting the fund :-)
Scientific mystery solved by Google (Score:5, Funny)
Man, sciencing is so much easier these days.
No, he did not (Score:5, Insightful)
He proposed an explanation more plausible than people before.
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No, he did not
Always remember Betteridge's Law of Headlines [wikipedia.org] whenever you see a question mark at the end of a headline like this. Question headlines have always been a trademark of poor article writing.
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>Question headlines have always been a trademark of poor article writing.
broad generalization
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Your mind has been blown.
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Ending a headline in a question mark merely means they're writing in a language that is younger than Latin and has borrowed the shorthand notation developed by barbarians unwilling to write the questions out in full.
isnt it sorta cool (Score:1)
Could not have been... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Can't tell if stupid, or ignorant.
Re:Could not have been... (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't tell if stupid, or ignorant.
Well, for it to have affected the entire planet, the supernova would have had to be on the celestial equator. If it was displaced significantly from the celestial equator, then the radiant energy from the supernova simply wouldn't hit the Earth's surface at certain latitudes - for the same reasons that the polar regions experience periods of perpetual darkness.
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It's irrelevant because C14 is derived from N14 in the upper atmosphere, and the atmosphere is well-stirred. The higher C14 would get mixed in globally no matter which side of the Earth was irradiated.
The real issue is that all these sorts of "global event in year X" events start with a discovery at one or a few sites. For example, the iridium spike at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary was first found at Gubbio, Italy. Then it was found at dozens of other sites world-wide at the same boundary, but it took
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It's irrelevant because C14 is derived from N14 in the upper atmosphere, and the atmosphere is well-stirred. The higher C14 would get mixed in globally no matter which side of the Earth was irradiated.
Actually, only the troposphere is well stirred. The stratosphere and layers above it aren't stirred as much, and they settle into layers: hence stratosphere. Nevertheless, your point is well taken. By the time the excess C14 reaches the leaves of the trees, it is most likely well dispersed all over the planet.
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"Can't tell if stupid, or ignorant."
Can't tell if poorly educated, or just ignorant of where Japan is in relation to England and how day and night works.
Oh, wait, one and the same thing.
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This could not have been caused by a supernova. A supernova would have affected almost the entire planet, not just Japan.
Don't you mean: "This could not have been caused by a supernova. A supernova would have affected almost the entire planet, not just two tree ring samples from Japan"?
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Nobody said that the wood that had the carbon 14 spikes was in trees still alive today nor that only Japanese trees show the spike, just that wood that has been reliably dated to 775 in japan has the spike.
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Oh, I just realized not a lot of trees live to be 1300 years old. So...there's that, lol. Someone take a geiger counter to the redwood forests :-P
No, we will have to chop them all down to correctly analyze the rings. Of course, in order not to waste the wood we will sell it to the highest bidder. And we will have to cut down a large number of trees so as to get a good statistical sample.
--- Yours in Science and Industry (or Industry and 'Science')
Dick Cheney
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Think of the dust cloud as a kid with a magnifying glass, and Japan as the ants.
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In those days, the earth was still stationary at the centre of the universe. Under those conditions astronomical phenomena may have only been visible from and effect some parts of the earth and not others. I guess it would depend on which crystal sphere the supernova occurred in.
Slashdot comment on June 4 predates podcast (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org]
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.
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Does that mean I've been tricked into reading TFA?
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he just stole* the information from a /. post.
Was the Slashdot poster an expert on the religious writings of Saxony in 774, or did he Google it (too?)?
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JustOK's sig is "rewriting history since 2109", so it's possible they just copied the Nature article from three weeks in the future.
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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.
Perhaps JustOK is the actual student and is just bad at remember dates:-/
from older Nature article about the spike (Score:3)
"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?
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Yes, that means the supernova contributed to 1.2% of the neutron radiation of the Sun, as the rest of the Universe isn't really relevant for calculations.
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Elaborating on your useful comment :
>as the rest of the Universe isn't really relevant for calculations
>that means the supernova contributed to 1.2% of the neutron radiation of the Sun
eaeliest supernova recorded in history [wikipedia.org]: earliest, because that correlates with brightness. It's brightness -8. Brightness of Sun is -27
2^19=500K difference - far from 1.2%. But that's only slightly relevant since you
physics question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:physics question (Score:5, Informative)
The radiation turns one proton in a nitrogen atom into a neutron, changing the atom from nitrogen to carbon, with two extra neutrons.
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If you'd bothered to wikipede: "Cosmic rays are energetic charged subatomic particles, originating in outer space.They may produce secondary particles that penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and surface. The term ray is historical as cosmic rays were thought to be electromagnetic radiation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_rays
"Carbon-14 is produced in the upper layers of the troposphere and the stratosphere by thermal neutrons absorbed by nitrogen atoms. When cosmic rays enter the atmosphere, they underg
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If your source of all things certain is wikipeding, you shouldn't bother posting replies.
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It's only a few nuclei that fall completely apart when they encounter a neutron. In fact, the first time physicists observed that happening, it was so unexpected that they didn't realize at first that it was what they were seeing.
Most absorb the neutron, often having a secondary reaction that changes them to a different element.
Tritium is not sorted out of seawater. With a half-life of 12 years it isn't found in nature. You may be thinking of deuterium.
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Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium [wikipedia.org]) gives numerous ways to "make" tritium.
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n+N14 ->C14 + p
See the radiocarbon dating page at wikipedia.
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The reason Carbon 14 dating works is because cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere keep creating more Carbon 14, keeping the level of Carbon 14 in the atmosphere constant fairly constant. Carbon 14 is absorbed through photosynthesis, resulting in the amount within a plant being roughly the same proportion as the amount in the atmosphere. Once the plant dies (or in the case of tree rings, once that ring is done growing) no more Carbon 14 is absorbed, and the amount in the plant material starts to decline alon
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Tritium is made by shoving lithium or deuterium into a nuclear reactor where it absorbs a neutron and splits apart (lithium) or just keeps the neutron (deuterium).
Sahara movie had a like this in it (Score:1)
It's funny the movie had something like this in it. I don't want to do any spoiler of the movie
How old is Google? (Score:1)
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No, but it will in 20 years. Brin's been working on a time machine.
Red Crucifix In the Sky Can Mean Only One Thing... (Score:3)
Dragons!!!
Dragons! [Re:Red Crucifix In the Sky Can Mean...] (Score:2)
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-
Unidentified Flying Crucifix (Score:3)
The art of finding what you are looking for (Score:2)
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.
Evangelion (Score:2)
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) [wikipedia.org]
Did the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle look something like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eva_cross_explosion.png [wikipedia.org]
It Seems Dubious on Physical Grounds (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [nasa.gov] also see: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469(1964)021%3C0134%3APOCBSP%3E2.0.CO%3B2 [ametsoc.org]
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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Death star's right here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimas_(moon) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Religious misinterpret phenomenon (Score:4, Funny)
Number of times this has happened: too many to count.
That's not very scientific is it?
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Centuries later, scientists figure out what actually happened using careful observation. Number of times this has happened: too many to count.
And most of these "observations" of weird stuff in the night sky were due to the aurorae. Even in modern light-polluted England where the telly rules the evenings, some people will always spot a decent aurora. Here are examples from England [nationalgeographic.com] and Scotland [bbcimg.co.uk], which are nothing compared to those visible at higher geomagnetic latitudes.
Re:Religious misinterpret phenomenon (Score:5, Funny)
And most of these "observations" of weird stuff in the night sky were due to the aurorae.
As opposed to today, where they are due to alcohol.
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Re:Religious misinterpret phenomenon (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, without the religious text, there wouldn't even be a written record of what happened at all. I'd say everyone wins.
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And yet, without the religious text, there wouldn't even be a written record of what happened at all. I'd say everyone wins.
What religious text? Since when are chronicles "religious texts"?
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More likely, the event would have been recorded more objectively without all the religious bullsh^Wovertones.
By whom exactly? Your prejudice is showing.
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That's because the church held a monopoly on education. If that weren't the case, the chroniclers wouldn't have been monks and the chronicles would have been more accurate. Your cowardice is showing.
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You seem to have a problem with cause-effect relationships. The monks were the only chroniclers because the church held a monopoly on education. Probably, without the church's monopoly, there would have been non-religious chroniclers who would have reported the facts without religious interpretations.
Your ineptitude at logic reasoning is showing.
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The reason why they had a monopoly has nothing to do with my point. They did, and that spurred the consequences I'm discussing.
You're wrong on all counts. First of all, I have no "fear of religion". Contempt is more like it. It's not based on ignorance, because I know the christian religion better than 95% of
Re:Religious misinterpret phenomenon (Score:4)
So instead we get to worry about modern idiots being offended by something that wasn't offensive back in the day. Your Dogma is showing.
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The word "dragon" used as a metaphor (Score:3)
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?
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There was no year zero. Due to various historical "stuff" the year just before "year 1 after Christ" is "year 1 before Christ". Blame the Romans. The Christ from the mythology was born in "the year 1 after Christ". Funny. Also why the first day of the new millennium was January 1st 2001, making all the people who partied in 1999-2000 wrong :-)
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Oh no. Prince told me to party like it was 1999. Prince is never wrong. How dare you say such a thing? Perhaps you just don't know how to party?
Sorry, I mean the Artist Formally Known as Prince. I don't want to confuse anyone...
Year 0 (Score:2)
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 pra
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The Christ from the mythology was born in "the year 1 after Christ". Funny.
Or, according to historians, more likely 7 years 'before Christ'.
Actually, I'm not sure if Yoshua of Nazereth was was 'the Christ' until about 26 'after Christ'. Some theologian will have to help out there.
Oh, the Causality!
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There was no year zero.
Actually, nobody was using the Julian calendar (as commonly understood) at the time anyway. Though month length rules were approximately the same as now (in the Roman empire) years were described in a completely different way, typically according to who was currently consul. Scholars of history used numbering, but they counted from the founding of the Rome. Dating according to AD rules was only proposed in the year 525, and took quite a long time to spread. Thus, arguably anyone talking about an AD year bef
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Why go the facebook route?
The discussion is linked directly underneath the submission in the "related links" section.
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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.