The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

****************************************

When the volcano blows

It's a point I've made here more than once; if you're trying to convince someone of something, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it.

The reason this comes up today is the horrible situation in Iceland, where (at the time of this writing) the people of the little village of Grindavík on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula, due south of the capital city of Reykjavík, have been evacuated and are waiting for a volcanic eruption that stands a good chance of destroying the town completely.  The buildings and roads in the town have already sustained heavy damage from nearly continuous earthquakes, and the latest estimate is that there are places where the magma is only five hundred meters below the surface.  An eruption is nearly certain -- how extensive it will be is unknown.  (The village is only a few kilometers away from Fagradallsfjall, the volcano I got to see erupting when I visited Iceland in 2022.)

A photograph I took in August 2022

This is certainly awful.  But the whole situation is made worse because every time there's a volcanic eruption, it brings the climate change deniers howling from the dark corners where they hide, claiming that (as one of them put it) "the Climate Scammers conveniently ignore that a single volcanic eruption puts hundreds of times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than cars do.  Climate ups and downs happen all the time, and natural processes account for nearly all of it.  Wake up!"

Which would be a good argument if anything about it was true.

The "hundreds of times more" statistic is about the right factor -- but the inequality points the other direction.  Here's the actual situation, as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

You might not spot the volcanic carbon dioxide output on this graph right away, because it's the light blue line hugging the x-axis.  In fact, as Mark Gongloff points out, writing for Bloomberg, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens spewed ten million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which seems like a lot until you find out that our burning of fossil fuels does that every two and a half hours.  Geologists estimate that even a cataclysmic eruption like the Yellowstone Supervolcano emitted on the order of thirty gigatons of carbon dioxide -- about what our fossil fuel use accomplishes every single year.

So not only are the climate change deniers coldly and callously capitalizing on the horrible situation unfolding in Iceland, they're doing so by crafting outrageous lies about it.

The fact that this claim is wildly wrong has not stopped it from being circulated all over the place by people who would very much like it if we didn't have to face head-on what we're currently doing to the planet we live on.  I get it; it's a hard conversation to have.  I have an electric car and solar panels and solar hot water, but even so, I very much live an affluent First-World lifestyle, with all that comes along with it.  I'm better situated than most if it came to a serious cutback in fossil fuel use, and it still would force me and my family into some difficult changes.

But we can't keep going as we are.  If this past year's insane weather didn't convince you of that fact, you're being willfully blind.

And the whole thing is not helped by circulating wildly wrong information whose sole intent is to lull everyone into further inaction.  I have no doubt that at least some of the people who are posting this stuff don't know it's wrong, and are guilty of the rather common sin of neglecting to fact-check.  But the ones who write these posts and create these memes -- they know it's a lie, and they do it anyway.

Which is somewhere beyond reprehensible.

So please, please, please... if you see someone posting this claim, tell them they're wrong.  Link this blog post if you like, or (better still) send them to the NOAA and USGS sites that lay the data out in unarguable form.  Because this is a falsehood with serious repercussions -- like endangering the long-term habitability of our own home world.

****************************************

A galactic rabbit hole

It was over ten years ago that I ran into the bizarre claim that the Rh negative allele -- the gene that gives people type-negative blood -- comes from aliens.  According to Roberta Hill, who wrote a book about it, Rh-negative blood also comes along with a lot of other characteristics, such as a love of science, psychic abilities, unexplained scars on the body, and having an extra rib.

Since I only have one copy of the gene, maybe that's why I only hit one out of four, there.

Given that evolutionary genetics is kind of my thing, I happen to know that the actual origin of the Rh negative allele is a mutation that occurred something like fifteen thousand years ago in the Basque region of Spain, where the gene is still most common.  (My mom's ancestry is mostly from western France, so her being Rh-negative is no real surprise.)  

Anyhow, I proceeded to forget all about my alleged alien ancestry until yesterday, when a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site called Galactic Anthropology, which (1) expanded the alien blood type thing to include everyone with type O blood, and (2) launched me down a rabbit hole that it took me over an hour to escape from.

The post in question contains information from someone called "Myrah," who is supposedly a "Sirius B/Pleiadian hybrid" and who is "a medical specialist specializing in interdimensional implant technologies."  Whatever the fuck that means.  As far as her having ancestry from Sirius B, allow me to point out right here that Sirius B is a white dwarf star, the companion star to the (much) brighter Sirius A (from our perspective, the brightest star in the sky other than the Sun).  Being a white dwarf, it's the leftover core of a large-ish star that burned through its fuel and then went nova, so it's a little hard to figure how any inhabitants of planets orbiting it would have survived.

Maybe Myrah's family escaped because they're "interdimensional," I dunno.

Then, there's the problem that the other half of her ancestry is from the Pleiades, which is an entire cluster of stars, so I don't know how that'd work, either.

Anyhow, there's an illustration of Myrah on the site, and she looks a little like the love child of Uma Thurman and one of the aliens from Avatar:

What Myrah says is that the O blood type is extraterrestrial, and got into humanity because the Annunaki came here and had lots of sex with humans, but then they found out that O-type blood was "not compatible with other Terran blood types."  Notwithstanding that it's the most common blood type on Earth, and seems not to be associated with health issues of any kind.  But this didn't stop Myrah and her friends from engineering the Rh antigen, because supposedly that would stop people with O-type blood who mated with other types from having sterile children.

Which, of course, runs up against the minor difficulty that this never happens.

I'm a case in point, in fact.  My mom was O-negative, meaning she had O-type blood but lacked the Rh antigen.  My dad was A-positive.  If Myrah was right, I'd be sterile, and I have two boys who are completely normal except for the fact that they both look like me, which is unfortunate but not life-threatening.

Oh, and I also found out that if you are O-negative, you are less likely to be eaten by Reptilian aliens, because they "dislike consuming their own blood."  Probably accounting for how my mom made it to 84 without being eaten by Reptilians.

So because the whole blood type thing was kind of a non-starter, I decided to peruse the site a little more.  And that's when I vanished down a rabbit hole of weirdness that I still haven't recovered from.  Here are a few of the articles I found:

• How to be Reshuffled into a Higher-Density Avatar Body
• An Altean Ship as the Foundation of Atlantis
• Living Near Betelgeuse in the Orion Constellation
• Crystals As Bridges Between Densities
• An Atomic Toilet in Space

I swear I didn't make any of these up, even the last one, which includes the sentence, "After you’re done, some kind of haze comes up from below to make sure everything is very hygienic, and it leaves a nice smell behind, perhaps the smell of the Erran Oshksha flowers?"

Ha-ha, sure!  Erran Oshksha flowers!  Just like my grandma used to grow in her garden near Betelgeuse!

In any case, apparently O-type blood and Rh-negative blood both come from aliens.  Possibly explaining why my family is weird as fuck.  To the loyal reader who sent me the link, I just want to say thanks for convincing me that I understand my fellow humans even less than I thought I did.  But if "Myrah" has any more missives from Sirius B and/or the Pleiades, I'd just as soon not know about them.  I'm still going to have a while before I'm done processing what I learned about Atlantis, interdimensional implant technologies, and atomic space toilets.

****************************************

The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch

One of the problems that crops up in discussions of cryptids is that a lot of people consistently fall back on arguments based upon the number of alleged sightings.  "It's been seen hundreds of times," they'll say.  "It's got to be real.  All those sightings can't be wrong."

This argument is backwards, and the reason why has to do with a misunderstanding of statistics.  Let's consider two species, a common one and an extremely rare one.  It's no stretch to assume that the common one should be sighted more often than the rare one.  But you'd also surmise that if you set out to do so, hard evidence of the common one should be way easier to come by.  If you set out traps, you should catch more of the common one than the rare one.

So far, nothing very surprising.

A cryptid -- or, in fact, any paranormal phenomenon -- with more anecdotal reports should also leave behind more in the way of hard evidence.  If the Omaha Weasel Man has only ever been seen once, okay, maybe it's not so surprising we don't have any proof of his existence.  But if there are hundreds, or even thousands, of sightings, shouldn't there be something in the way of scientifically-admissible evidence?  A bone, a tuft of hair with DNA not from any known species, something?

Zero hard evidence along with lots of anecdotal reports strongly suggests a different answer -- gullibility, misinterpretation of what witnesses have seen or heard, or outright fraud.

Which brings us to the infamous Skinwalker Ranch.

The Skinwalker Ranch is a 512-acre plot of land in a remote region of Uintah County, Utah.  It gets its name from the Navajo legend of the yee naaldlooshii (which translates to "it goes on all fours"), which is an evil magician who can take the shape of a non-human animal at will.

Skinwalker Ranch has been the site of literally hundreds of bizarre claims, including:

• UFOs (lots of these)
• vanished or mutilated cattle
• glowing orbs hovering over the ground/"ball lightning"
• invisible objects emitting sparks and powerful magnetic fields
• large animals with glowing red eyes that are alleged to be unharmed by gunfire

The last one is what gave the place its name, and comes along with a legend of uncertain provenance -- that the Navajo who lived there were attacked and enslaved by Ute warriors, and the Navajo cursed the place, saying whoever settled there afterward would be plagued by an evil spirit who could take the form of a wolf.  Several successions of modern owners of the property have claimed to have seen this thing, most notably Gwen and Terry Sherman and their family, who owned it from 1994 to 1996, and Robert Bigelow, who bought it from the Shermans in 1996 and owned it until 2016.  The Shermans are the first ones who made a big deal about bizarre happenings on the place, including seeing strange, wolf-like animals, and a sighting of an "orb filled with a glowing blue fluid" that supposedly killed three of their dogs.  Bigelow, a prominent businessman, is deeply interested in UFOs and other sketchy phenomena, and bought the ranch because of the Shermans' stories; he can be credited with bringing the site to national attention.

So, naturally, people have tried to figure out what's going on there, with some of the more scientifically-minded saying that the strange animal sightings, at least, have a natural explanation -- they're a surviving population of dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus).  There are two problems with this, of increasing difficulty: first, that the most recent dated remains of dire wolves is from almost ten thousand years ago, and second, if there is an extant population somewhere in the Uintah Basin, they've left exactly zero evidence.

Artist's reconstruction of a dire wolf [Image is in the Public Domain]

In fact, that last bit is the sticking point about Skinwalker Ranch in general.  Robert Bigelow founded a group he called the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose sole raison d'être was to find evidence for claims of the paranormal, and after a long investigation of the claims from Skinwalker Ranch, they concluded -- and this is a direct quote -- they had "difficulty obtaining evidence consistent with scientific publication."

Which is a euphemism for "we found fuck-all in the way of proof."

So the problem here is, we have a place that -- to listen to the hype -- has UFOs out the wazoo, strange meteorological phenomena, and wild animal sightings that are (depending on who you believe) something like a werewolf, or a ten-thousand-year prehistoric holdover.  And despite all that, there has not been a single piece, not the tiniest shred, of hard evidence.  To me that argues strongly that the whole thing is a publicity stunt.  It may well have started out with some odd observations that were misinterpreted -- the Shermans certainly seem to have been earnest enough -- but after Bigelow got involved, it's become one tactic after another to keep people's attention on the place.  UFOlogist Barry Greenwood, who investigated the ranch earlier this year and also came up empty-handed, said Bigelow was "always in the business of selling belief and hope."

Belief and hope aren't the only things he's selling.  It's telling that in 2020, Bigelow, filed for -- and was approved for -- a trademark on the Skinwalker Ranch name, for the purpose of "providing recreation facilities; entertainment services, namely, creation, development, production, and distribution of multimedia content, internet content, motion pictures, and television shows...  cups and mugs, shirts and short-sleeved shirts, sports caps and hats."

Gullibility is, as always, big business.

So once again, we're faced with the difficulty that just the sheer quantity of anecdotal reports doesn't mean there's anything real behind it; in fact, without hard evidence, it can actually argue for the opposite.  The wolves of Skinwalker Ranch are very likely to be nonexistent.  As much as I, like Fox Mulder, "want to believe," this one appears to be a non-starter as anything but a way to make money.

****************************************

The voice of an angel

New from the "It's Not A Sin When We Do It" department, we have: Christian Charismatics using a spin-off of the Ouija board to contact angels.

I was sent this story by a friend and long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, and my first thought was, "This can't be true."  Sadly, it is.  The same people who go on and on about how evil Ouija boards are and how you're risking your eternal soul even being in the same room with one are now saying that their Ouija boards are just fine and dandy.

The "Angel Board" is available from Amazon at the low-low-low price of $28 (plus shipping and handling).  In the product description, we're told that we can "ask any question we want, and the Angel Board will answer."  If you don't like that particular one, it turns out there are dozens of different makes and models, some costing hundreds of dollars.  

Because we can't just have one company capitalizing on people's gullibility.

Interestingly, if not surprisingly, the reviews have been uniformly good. One five-star review says:

I have been on a path of spiritual enlightenment for 1 year now.  I have two other friends who have shared this path with me.  We share books, experiences, thoughts and feelings, but when one of us (not me) bought this book and “game” board to communicate with our higher-level guides or “guardian angels,” it became a turning point in my journey.  I didn’t think I was “advanced enough” or “spiritual enough” to make this thing work.  I learned, in about 2 minutes, that doubting myself was doubting God and his angels!  In one evening, I met my higher guide, felt unconditional love, and knew I wasn’t alone and never had been.  I was convinced, beyond all reason, of the presence of my angel.  To this date, I call him “J” as we haven’t yet tuned our energies to really work out the spelling of the name…  I asked him if “J” would be okay, and he said, “yes.”  He has answered to “J” ever since!  One evening, before I was able to acquire an “angel board” of my own, I tried an Ouija Board.  It took several attempts before J was able to answer me, but when he did, I asked if he preferred the angel board and he responded “yes.”  We had a very difficult, short conversation that night. The angel board is a MUST for all those who seek a closer relationship with their guardian angel, and who have not had much practice in meditation and raising their energies to a compatible level with the light bodies waiting to guide us!

It's to be hoped that when they "tune their energies" and she finds out "J's" actual name, it's not a rude shock.  It'd kind of suck if she thought she was talking to the Archangel Jophiel and it turned out she was having a conversation with, say, Jar-Jar Binks.

It bears mention, however, that not everyone is so sanguine about the Angel Board.  At the site Women of Grace, we're given the following warning:

Angel boards are just as dangerous as Ouija boards, perhaps more so because they haves [sic] the same purpose as a Ouija board – contacting “spirits” – only they pretend to be summoning guardian angels to make it seem less dangerous...  This is so dangerous on so many levels.  When a person evokes spirits of the dead, he or she is never in control because they are dealing with preternatural forces.  These are powerful beings who are possessed of super-human intelligence, strength and cunning.  Only the most naïve would think that they can control summoned spirits merely by “politely” asking them to come or go...  Needless to say, angel boards should be strictly avoided.

Over at Our Spiritual Quest, "ex medium and professional astrologer" Marcia Montenegro agrees:

Any attempt to contact or summon an angel will result in contact only with a fallen angel.  Spiritism is strongly forbidden and denounced by God and angels are spirit creatures.

 
There is no example anywhere in the Bible of anyone contacting an angel.  The angels who brought messages or did other things for people in the Bible were sent at God’s command.  They were never summoned by man.

 
Asking questions using this Board is the same as using a Ouija Board.  In both cases, only fallen angels, disguised as good angels, as guardian angels, or as the dead, will respond.

I never realized that borrowing from the spiritualists was such a big thing among the hyper-religious, but apparently it is.  There's even a "Christian Tarot deck," available at (surprise!) Amazon, which says that the practice if done right is "biblically consonant."  As you might imagine, this got quite a reaction, both from the people who think Tarot cards are the instrument of the devil and those who think divination is a divine gift.

Weirder still, sometimes those are the same people, just on different days.  Kris Vallotton, pastor of the Bethel Church and self-styled "spiritual leader," heard people said that he and his church members were using Christian Tarot cards developed by a group called "Christalignment," and responded in no uncertain terms:

This is insane... whoever is doing this needs to repent the craziness in the name of "reaching people for Christ..."  There are people who listen to our teaching and create strange and/or anti-biblical applications in our name...  [W]e need wisdom as we move into the cesspool we call the world.  Stop the craziness!

Shortly afterwards, Vallotton responded to his response in no uncertain terms:

There has been some recent concern about the ministry of Christalignment and their supposed use of “Christian tarot cards” in ministering to people at New Age festivals.  While the leaders of this ministry (Ken and Jenny Hodge) are connected with several members of our community (including being the parents to our much-loved brother, evangelist Ben Fitzgerald), Christalignment is not formally affiliated with Bethel.  We do, however, have a value for what they are seeking to accomplish.

When his followers raised hell about his sudden about-face, not to mention an apparent chumminess with occultists, Vallotton responded to the response to his response in no uncertain terms:

Let’s be clear: I was speaking against Tarot cards and their use, which I am still against.  I was addressing people who were accusing Bethel taking part in this practice.  We don’t and never have been been apart [sic] of this.  So that’s still true!  The people who were named in the article, were never named in the people’s accusations of us (that I knew of at the time) nor did I name anyone in my posts.  The article turned out to be fake news against great people who love God, don’t use Tarot cards and lead 1000s of people who do, to Christ.

So there you have it.  He's unequivocally for it except in the sense that he's unequivocally against it.

But he did get some support from one of his followers who said she thought there was nothing wrong even if these were Tarot cards, because -- and I swear I am not making this up -- he says that "'Tarot' is 'Torah' spelled backwards."

Predictably, I read all this with an expression like this:

My general impression is that the whole lot of it -- Tarot cards, Ouija boards, angelology, and the entire Charismatic movement -- is nonsense.  So arguing about whether a silly board game or some funny pictures printed on cheap card stock are going to put you in touch with an angel or with the Prince of Darkness is a little like arguing over whether 2 + 3 equals 17 or 358.

Anyhow, thanks to the loyal reader who sent me the link.  I suppose it's a good thing that this is what the hyper-Christians are currently spending their time discussing.  It's less time they'll have to spend trying to shoehorn young-Earth creationism into public school science curricula and voting in Christofascist authoritarians to public office.  If those are my other options, I'll take sacred Ouija boards any day.

****************************************

MoND denied

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about MoND -- modified Newtonian dynamics -- a new(ish) model of gravitation that purported to explain some of odd measurements of stellar and galactic motion without the necessity of dark matter.

Here's the situation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the brilliant astronomer Vera Rubin discovered something peculiar.  The project she was working on involved mapping the speed of revolution of stars around galactic centers.  According to Newton's Law of Gravitation and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion (which, after all, have the same mathematical underpinning), stars farther away from the center should be moving more slowly.  This principle works fine, for example, in our own Solar System; Neptune moves more slowly than Mercury does.

This, Rubin found, turned out not to be true on larger scales.  The velocities of stars in the farther reaches of galaxies were moving just as fast as the ones closer to the center.  Nicknamed the flat rotation curve problem, it seemed like the only possible explanation was that there was more mass in the galaxy than had been detected -- something appeared to be causing the outer stars to orbit faster than Newtonian dynamics said they should.

Rubin and others called this mysterious something dark matter. 

And you probably know the amount of this stuff is significant.  If you add up all the detectable mass/energy in the universe, only 5% of it is ordinary matter.  26.8% of it is dark matter, and 68.2% is dark energy, an unrelated type of mass/energy that is thought to be responsible for the runaway expansion of the universe, and which is even less understood than dark matter is.

Dark matter interacts with regular matter via gravity, but -- as far as we can tell -- in no other way.  It seems to be completely unaffected by the other forces that act on the ordinary stuff we see on a day-to-day basis.  There have been various experiments set up to try to detect dark matter particles, but as of the time of this writing, every single one of them has come up empty-handed.  It's bizarre to think about; a substance that makes up five times more of the mass of the universe than all the regular matter put together, and thus far, we haven't the slightest idea what it's made of.

There's also the problem that the Standard Model -- the framework that accounts for all the ordinary matter particles, and how they interact -- is one of the most rigorously-tested theories in science, and performs to a level of precision that beggars belief.  And nothing in the Standard Model appears to admit of some strange extra particle(s) that might account for dark matter.

Well, along came Mordehai Milgrom, who in 1983 tried something a little like what Einstein did with respect to the luminiferous aether -- he said, "I have a new theory that eliminates the need for dark matter entirely."  It's called modified Newtonian dynamics, MoND for short, and proposes that the problem is that Newton's Law of Gravitation doesn't work for objects experiencing really low accelerations (like the stars in the outer reaches of galaxies).  Like the Theories of Relativity, it leaves the model relatively unchanged at the velocities and accelerations we encounter on a daily basis; here on the surface of the Earth, Newton still works just fine.  But what Einstein did for systems in extreme gravitational fields or high velocities, Milgrom did for systems experiencing really low accelerations -- tweaking the mathematics to make it match the observations.

And those tweaks, in one stroke, eliminated the need for some hypothetical and undetectable form of matter.

The Whirlpool Galaxy [Image licensed under the Creative Commons NASA/ESA/JPL/Hubble Heritage Team & C. Violette, M51 (2), CC BY-SA 4.0]

Well, the race was on to try to figure out which model was correct -- Newton (with dark matter) or MoND (without it).  And earlier this year, Korean astrophysicist Kyu-Hyun Chae seemed to have settled it once and for all, showing that observations of wide binaries -- pairs of stars orbiting their common centers of gravity at large distances -- matched the predictions of MoND brilliantly.

However, there were astrophysicists who immediately had objections.  Chae, they said, had not done a good job of eliminating data points that were problematic.  The difficulty is that if you're observing a binary pair from Earth, to figure out the velocities and accelerations of the stars in the pair, you have to take into account a variety of complicating factors, including:

• the speed the entire system is moving toward or away from Earth
• the eccentricity (elliptical-ness) of the orbit
• the inclination of the orbit -- how much it's tilted toward or away from us

So a group of researchers, led by astrophysicist Indranil Banik of the University of St. Andrews, has developed a technique for sifting through the data points and using the ones for which there is the best confidence in the velocity measurements (significantly, Banik's team only eliminated about twenty percent of Chae's data points).  And in their paper, which came out five days ago, they found when they do that, the agreement of the data with MoND vanishes completely.

Without the wonky data points, the measurements from wide binaries that seemed to settle the argument in favor of MoND actually agree with Newtonian dynamics...

... to a confidence of 19 σ.  To us non-scientists -- as the wonderful YouTuber Dr. Becky Smethurst explains it -- a 19 σ confidence level means there is only a one in one hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion chance that their result is a statistical fluke.  (And if you want to know more, I highly recommend watching Dr. Becky's video on the new paper, which is awesome.)

So with regards to theories of gravity, it appears that Newton is the only game in town, meaning we're stuck with dark matter.  MoND is dead in the water, so unless someone comes up with some sort of different model entirely that matches the data better than Newton does, we'll have to keep looking for this ghostly matter whose only fingerprint is its gravity.

It's an exciting time to be an astrophysicist... or just a deeply curious science nerd.

****************************************

The story of the Scablands

After my rather cataclysmic posts about geology last week, which looked at the volcano off the Greek island of Thera and the fault just waiting to rupture near the Pacific Northwest, one of my friends and a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me if I'd ever done a post on the "Channeled Scablands."  I told him I'd mentioned it once or twice, but always in passing.

So as befits a catastrophe so big it beggars belief, I thought a more thorough look was warranted.

There's a bizarre bit of terrain in what is now eastern Washington and Oregon that goes by the rather horrid-sounding name my friend referenced, and if you ever fly over it, you'll see why.  It's formed of teardrop-shaped pockets of relatively intact topsoil surrounded by gullies floored with bare rock.  The terrain has the look of what a shallow stream does to a sandy beach as it flows into sea, only on a gargantuan scale:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons DKRKaynor, Channeled Scablands, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then there's Dry Falls, in the upper Grand Coulee Basin, which even has a plunge pool basin at its foot... but almost no water:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Steven Pavlov / http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Senapa / CC BY-SA 3.0, Dry Falls (Washington), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Geologists figured out pretty quickly that the entire terrain was sculpted by a huge amount of running water.  But the problem is, the entire area is a desert, and apparently has been for a long while.

So where'd all the water come from -- and where did it go?

The answer turned out to be the Missoula Megaflood -- a tremendous flood (thus the name) that occurred eighteen thousand years ago, and which is right up there with Thera and the Cascadia Subduction Zone on our list of things that are big and scary and can kill you.

What apparently happened is that during the last ice age, a glacial dam formed across the northern Idaho Rockies, blocking the outflow of what are now the Columbia, Snake, Okanogan, Pend Oreille, and Spokane Rivers.  As the climate warmed, the ice melted, but all that water had nowhere to go, so it backed up into an enormous lake -- called Lake Missoula -- that covered a good bit of what is now western Montana. 

As the ice age ended, the warming continued.  Eventually this caused the ice dam to collapse, and all that water drained out, sweeping across what is now eastern Washington, and literally scouring the place down to bedrock. 

What made the flood even worse was a phenomenon called isostasy.  We're used to thinking of the tectonic plates as moving back and forth, more or less parallel to the Earth's surface, but what is less obvious is that they can also move up and down -- perpendicular to the surface, like ice cubes bobbing in a glass of sweet tea.  These chunks of the Earth's crust are actually floating in the semi-solid mantle beneath them, and the level they float is dependent upon how heavy they are, just as putting heavy weights in a boat makes it float lower in the water. 

Well, as the Cordilleran Ice Sheet melted, that weight was removed, and this caused the flat piece of crust underneath it to lift upward on its eastern edge.

The whole western corner of the United States tilted toward the Pacific Ocean.  It's like having a full bowl of water on a table, and lifting one end of the table. The bowl will dump over, spilling out the water, and it will flow downhill and run off the edge -- just as Lake Missoula did.

The result was a colossal flood that at its peak was traveling at an estimated one hundred kilometers an hour.  Dry Falls was, at that point, an enormous waterfall five times the width of Niagara Falls, with a flow rate ten times higher than all of the rivers in the world combined.

[Nota bene: This sort of isostatic tilt is still going on today, most notably underneath Great Britain.  During the last ice age, Scotland was completely glaciated; southern England was not.  The melting of those glaciers has resulted in isostatic rebound, lifting the northern edge of the island by ten centimeters per century.  The problem is, the whole country is connected (however a lot of Scottish people might wish otherwise), so the entire island is tipping like a teeter-totter.  The tilt is pushing southern England downward, and it's sinking, at about five centimeters per century.  Fortunately, there's no giant lake waiting to spill across the country.]

These kinds of megafloods aren't uncommon, usually during the transition between a glacial and an interglacial period.  Another place this happened is not far from where I live -- around thirteen thousand years ago, there was an ice dam across what is now the St. Lawrence River, blocking the main outflow from the Great Lakes.  This backed all that water up into a huge lake called Lake Agassiz, which encompassed all of the Great Lakes and then some.  It was the same story as Lake Missoula; as the climate warmed, the ice dam collapsed, and a large percentage of the water drained out into the North Atlantic.  Some climatologists think that this may have been responsible for the Younger Dryas event, when the warming trend in North America suddenly reversed, the temperatures dropping in only a few decades by an estimated 7 C -- because all that fresh water temporarily shut down the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, stopping the Gulf Stream in its tracks and sending eastern North America, Greenland, and western Europe back into the deep freeze for over a thousand years.  (The link between the draining of Lake Agassiz, the Younger Dryas, and the shutdown of the NAMOC is far from settled, however.)

This sort of thing, besides being fascinating in its own right, always makes me think of the people who talk about Earth being "fine tuned" for human habitation.  When you start looking into geology, climatology, and astronomy, you realize how tenuous our existence actually is.  That we've done as well as we have, despite all the natural calamities, is impressive, but our continued survival is hardly guaranteed.  We'd better start understanding the past history of our home, including the violent and uncomfortable bits -- lest our own reckless and heedless actions trigger a catastrophe we're ill prepared to deal with.

****************************************