Be Cool, Star

Unfortunately, I only have 1 reference article for this week’s blog, and it was listed as ‘Opinion’. So, if you don’t already, take this week’s blog with 2-3 grains of salt. I did try to follow the link to the original article in the Astronomical Journal, but I’m not subscribed to it, so couldn’t get past their first page. From the looks of some of the titles listed for their current issue, their articles are seriously geeky, which is why I sometimes have to rely on someone else to explain it to me. Having said all that, hand me an ice cube for my drink, and let’s get started.

NASA’s Spitzer space telescope (launched in 2003) has found 14 of the coldest stars known, but it’s expected that far more are waiting to be discovered. These 14 objects are hundreds of light-years away and are thought to have temperatures 350 to 620 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s bitterly cold for stars.

These are ‘failed stars’, also known as brown dwarfs, which have been known to exist for years. Spitzer and its sister, WISE, could recognize them by the hundreds before too long. Spitzer was assigned specific patches of space to study, but WISE has been tasked with studying the entire sky. WISE’s task is 40 times the size of Spitzer’s.

Brown dwarfs form like any other star, out of collapsing balls of gas and dust. But they are puny things, and never collect enough mass to ignite nuclear fusion and start shining. The smallest known so far are 5 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, and there are giant gas planets of that mass around other stars. Without nuclear fusion, what little internal heat these bodies started with eventually faded away.

It’s possible that WISE could find an object about Neptune-sized (or bigger) in the far reaches of our solar system. Raise your hand if you’ve heard the story of Planet X, a large planet so far out we can’t see it, but it has some disruptive tendencies for the orbits of the outer planets, dwarf planets and other objects we know of. Some scientists speculate it might even be a brown dwarf companion to our sun.

So are these 14 examples of planets or stars? Well, they’re hot for one, and unbelievably cold for the other. I assume someone will decide what they are, eventually.

www.networkworld.com/article/2231137/nasa-finds-14-new--seriously-chilled-stars.html

Where is Calukmul?

The original paragraph I saw about Calakmul consisted of 39 words, but something caught my attention. Usually, I might find 3 or 4 articles on the subject, each 1-2 pages long, and each repeating (or possibly contradicting) information in the other articles.

Calukmul’s different. The wikipedia article must be over 20 pages, and I don’t rely solely on wikipedia. So, let’s start, keeping in mind that I may have to boil things down drastically.

Calakmul (AKA Kalakmul) was a large and powerful Mayan city in what is now the Mexican state of Campeche, deep in the jungles of the Yucatan greater Peten Basin, 35 km (22 miles) from the Guatemalan border. During the Classic Period, Calakmul administered a large domain known as the Kingdom of the Snake. This region was marked by the emblem glyph of the snake head, read as ‘Kaan’. It is believed that the city existed from 550 BC to 900 AD. It held ‘powerhouse’ status from 500 AD to 800 AD.

Some of the major buildings can be traced back to at least 350 AD, with a 40-foot tall monument built sometime between 400 and 200 BC. This city’s long life gave plenty of time to create huge structures, following the Maya tradition of enlarging existing buildings by adding new layers and extending the lower floors. The earliest dated inscription found there is from 431 AD.

During the height of Calukmul’s existance, the city is believed to have had a population of 50,000, and 6,750 structures have been found there. Structure 2, their great pyramid, is the largest structure, standing over 45 m (148 ft), and contains 4 tombs. As explained in the previous paragraph, in MesoAmerica, the pyramid was increased in size by building upon the existing temple. Calakmul’s central monumental architecture covers about 2 sq km (0.77 sq miles), and the entire city - mostly covered with dense residential structures - is 20 sq km (7.7 sq miles).

Calukmul was linked to allied cities by causeway. It sits on a rise some 115 ft above and east of a large seasonal swamp, which was an important source of water. This seasonal swamp was linked to a sophisticated water-control system that encircled an 8.5 square mile area, considered the inner city. The swamp also provided fertile soil along its edge and access to abundant flint nodules. The rise was a limestone dome which the Maya had leveled. Homes began along the edge of the swamp, but during the Classic period, they were also built on high ground and small islands in the swamp.

But the swamp was not the only source of water, for Calakmul had an extensive system of at least 13 reservoirs, including the largest one found in the Maya world. Together, these held enough water to serve 50,000 to 100,000 people. There’s no sign that these reservoirs were used to irrigate crops, which were apparently dependant on the seasonal swamp, as mentioned before.

From 1 to 1000 AD, this area received regular rainfall, which would have made it fairly easy to support the city’s population of 50,000. Growing up in small towns, this sounds huge to me. But I also spent a large portion of my adult life living in Kansas City and Omaha, either one of which would dwarf Calukmul. When you look at the entire Snake kingdom, there were also 20 secondary cities, tertiary and quaternary sites, and rural areas. The total population of this 5,000 sq mile kingdom is estimated to have reached 1.75 million during the late Classic period. However, during the Terminal Class period, Calukmul’s population dramatically declined, and the rural population plummeted.

Throughout the Classic Period, Calukmul had an intense rivalry with the city of Tikal, which lay 100 km (62 miles) southeast. At one point, Calukmul and its allies defeated Tikal, but 150 years later, Tikal rose up anew, and ultimately, Calukmul not only lost its powerhouse status, but ceased to exist at all. Calukmul’s recorded history ends abruptly in 909 AD, about 200 years after Tikal defeated its king and sapped its power.

The great rivalry between Calukmul and Tikel could have been more than trying to prove which city could grab the most resources. Tikel was a powerful city before Calukmul. Tikal was strongly influenced by the central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan, and its rulers were male only. Calukmul, on the other hand, seems derived from the city of El Mirador, and both a king and queen often ruled together. However, for whatever reason, when I came across a (partial) list of Calukmul rulers, it assumed all the names were kings, with no explanation of why no queens’ names were included.

The long abandoned Calukmul was rediscovered by air on December 29, 1931. Its current name is Mayan for ‘two adjacent pyramids’. In ancient times, it was Ox Te’ Tuun, which means ‘Three Stones.’ It was visited in 1932-1938, and a map was begun of the city, but work then ceased until 1982-1994. It is now a UNESCO site, contained within a UNESCO biodiversity reserve, and is the subject of a large-scale project of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Unfortunately, the city was built with a soft limestone, so it is suffering from severe erosion, and many of the earlier inscriptions cannot be made out.

I’m very taken by this information, which was fairly uniform over all 3 articles I chose. In fact, after reading the Wikipedia article, the other 2 I chose were... monotonously uniform with it, although not nearly as heavy with intimate history of battles and the names of warring kings. But given these facts as I’ve gathered them, I can almost picture Calukmul, from start to finish, but particularly during its hey-day. Of course, that doesn’t mean it actually looked like anything I’ve dreamt up, but it’s more than what I’ve gotten from the few Maya ruins I’ve actually visited. What about you? Do you see anything more here than armies at war?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calakmul

https://www.locogringo.com/mexico/ways-to-play/mayan-ruins-archaeological-sites/calakmul-ruins/

http://mayanruins.info/mexico/calakmul-mexico/