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Did the Ancient Greeks and Native Americans Swap Starcharts? Author Ker Than I had a story on SPACE.com yesterday about a very cool discovery: a one-thousand year old petroglyph, or rock carving, that was found in Arizona and which might depict the supernova of 1006, or SN 1006. The carving is presumed to have been made an ancient group of Native Americans called the Hohokam. The researcher who made the discovery argues that symbols of a scorpion and stars on the petroglyph match the relative positions of SN 1006 to the constellation Scorpius when the star first exploded. Well, after...

Native Americans recorded supernova explosion 16:45 05 June 2006 NewScientist.com news service Zeeya Merali and Kelly Young The Arizonan petroglyph may depict the supernova of 1006 AD - the star symbol is on the right and the constellation Scorpius on the left (Image: John Barentine, Apache Point Observatory) This double-sun petroglyph at Chaco Canyon National Monument in New Mexico may depict the supernova of 4 July 1054 (Image: Mark Lansing) There are numerous examples of rock art in the Chaco Canyon National Monument depicting celestial objects (Image: Mark Lansing) Prehistoric Native Americans may have carved a record of a supernova...

A bright star suddenly appears on April 30, 1006 near the star Beta Lupi in the constellation Lupus. This bright star is yellowish-white in color. The star gets brighter, bright to a point, it is brighter than Venus and half Moon. It has a magnitude of -9 at its peak. The star was visible for a year and it disappeared afterwards. The bright star was a supernova. Supernovas are when a star explodes. The Supernova is recorded in Korea, China, Japan, Mesopotamia, and Europe, often by astrologers. The supernova was seen as an omen. The remnants of the 1006 Supernova...

Explanation: The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star, witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. This sharp, ground-based telescopic view uses narrowband data to track emission from ionized oxygen and hydrogen atoms (in blue and red) and explore the tangled filaments within the still expanding cloud. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning...