Ancient Sun Research Articles

The Heavenly Field: A Reconsideration of Mother Earth in the Æcerbot Rite

The Heavenly Field: A Reconsideration of Mother Earth in the <i>Æcerbot</i> Rite

Ancient sun protection: the evolutionary origin of plant UV-B signaling.

Ancient sun protection: the evolutionary origin of plant UV-B signaling.

An Orbital Window into the Ancient Sun’s Mass

Abstract Models of the Sun’s long-term evolution suggest that its luminosity was substantially reduced 2–4 billion years ago, which is inconsistent with substantial evidence for warm and wet conditions in the geological records of both ancient Earth and Mars. Typical solutions to this so-called “faint young Sun paradox” consider changes in the atmospheric composition of Earth and Mars, and, while attractive, geological verification of these ideas is generally lacking—particularly for Mars. One possible underexplored solution to the faint young Sun paradox is that the Sun has simply lost a few percent of its mass during its lifetime. If correct, this would slow, or potentially even offset, the increase in luminosity expected from a constant-mass model. However, this hypothesis is challenging to test. Here, we propose a novel observational proxy of the Sun’s ancient mass that may be readily measured from accumulation patterns in sedimentary rocks on Earth and Mars. We show that the orbital parameters of the Solar System planets undergo quasi-cyclic oscillations at a frequency, given by secular mode g 2 − g 5, that scales approximately linearly with the Sun’s mass. Thus by examining the cadence of sediment accumulation in ancient basins, it is possible distinguish between the cases of a constant-mass Sun and a more massive ancient Sun to a precision of greater than about 1 percent. This approach provides an avenue toward verification, or of falsification, of the massive early Sun hypothesis.

Top stories: CRISPR babies fallout, research funders’ tax havens, and our ancient shrinking sun

Top stories: CRISPR babies fallout, research funders’ tax havens, and our ancient shrinking sun

Did our ancient sun go on a diet? Bands of martian rock could solve the ‘faint young sun’ paradox

Did our ancient sun go on a diet? Bands of martian rock could solve the ‘faint young sun’ paradox

Organic Haze as a Biosignature in Anoxic Earth-like Atmospheres.

Early Earth may have hosted a biologically mediated global organic haze during the Archean eon (3.8–2.5 billion years ago). This haze would have significantly impacted multiple aspects of our planet, including its potential for habitability and its spectral appearance. Here, we model worlds with Archean-like levels of carbon dioxide orbiting the ancient Sun and an M4V dwarf (GJ 876) and show that organic haze formation requires methane fluxes consistent with estimated Earth-like biological production rates. On planets with high fluxes of biogenic organic sulfur gases (CS2, OCS, CH3SH, and CH3SCH3), photochemistry involving these gases can drive haze formation at lower CH4/CO2 ratios than methane photochemistry alone. For a planet orbiting the Sun, at 30× the modern organic sulfur gas flux, haze forms at a CH4/CO2 ratio 20% lower than at 1× the modern organic sulfur flux. For a planet orbiting the M4V star, the impact of organic sulfur gases is more pronounced: at 1× the modern Earth organic sulfur flux, a substantial haze forms at CH4/CO2 ∼ 0.2, but at 30× the organic sulfur flux, the CH4/CO2 ratio needed to form haze decreases by a full order of magnitude. Detection of haze at an anomalously low CH4/CO2 ratio could suggest the influence of these biogenic sulfur gases and therefore imply biological activity on an exoplanet. When these organic sulfur gases are not readily detectable in the spectrum of an Earth-like exoplanet, the thick organic haze they can help produce creates a very strong absorption feature at UV-blue wavelengths detectable in reflected light at a spectral resolution as low as 10. In direct imaging, constraining CH4 and CO2 concentrations will require higher spectral resolution, and R > 170 is needed to accurately resolve the structure of the CO2 feature at 1.57 μm, likely the most accessible CO2 feature on an Archean-like exoplanet. Key Words: Organic haze—Organic sulfur gases—Biosignatures—Archean Earth. Astrobiology 18, 311–329.

Geofuels: energy and the Earth

1. Introduction 2. The living Earth 3. Warmed from above: solar energy 4. Wind, water, and waves: energy from the fluid Earth 5. Covered with green: biofuels basics 6. Fossil farming: the geologic underpinnings of biofuels 7. The light of an ancient sun: fossil fuel origins 8. Digging for daylight: coal and oil shale 9. Skimming the cream: conventional oil and gas 10. Stuck in the mud: fossil fuels that fail to flow 11. Petrified petroleum: oil sand and gas hydrate 12. Water, water, everywhere 13. Primordial power: geothermal and nuclear 14. Out of sight, out of mind: geologic waste disposal 15. How long is forever?: energy and time 16. Conclusions.

Three Poems

38 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Santa Isabel Plaza de España The tired afternoon falls over a rhythm of palm trees clad in spring, human, a scattered voice. Above, the moon rounds its silver and, enamored, spins its gratitude – starry light swerves between the coupling of harnesses – through the gothic cypresses that toll the bells. Market River of joy full of the very thing played only by this Stradivarius of beings, trampoline that launches us from the pole of artifice to pristine contact with the virgin, packed bustle of naked Africa. . . . Protocol of baskets and tables, blood clots, deceit, yucca and the solemn fraternity in the act of being emptied and filled in between laughter, drawing coins without currency, rain of ancient sun on their backs. Lean out – by the skin of the day – into that open custom of exchange, a life running through skirts. Point Cristina & Point Fernanda Album of doves that comes to coo the sister couple who sleep in the sea. The air in the trees starts to play mime and comb, kiss and madrigal. Light. Calm. Silence. Waves, nothing more. . . . and the two sisters, wives of the sea. Three Poems Raquel Ilonbé Raquel Ilonbé (Raquel del Pozo Epita, 1939–92) was a poet, musician, and performer. Raised in Spain, in her mid-twenties she returned to Guinea, where she was able to reunite with her mother, whom she had believed dead. Her book Ceiba (1978) compiles poetry written between the 1960s and 1970s. Her collection of folkloric tales Leyendas guineanas (1981) is the result of years of research about the oral tradition of different ethnic groups in Equatorial Guinea. She left several poetry collections (Nerea, Ausencia, Amor, and Olvido) unpublished. My Memories I am growing old, my memories are making me grow old. I want to live and they don’t let me you must smile without complaint. My soul forcefully shouts, my convulsed body twists and complains. I want to give more, to scatter my petals across the naked lakes tracing their edge with resting feet. I am growing old, thinking about all that has happened Rivers Speak The rushes cover my body, my feet, my face, so no one sees that I silently listen to the water of the rivers that speak to me. The sound of the stones, grazing the river, are kisses of the afternoon and moon, and kisses of the dawn. One day someone told me that rivers never speak, that they only follow their course and escape wordlessly. How sad I spent that day on hearing his words, I went running toward the river so that he would explain to me why I hear him so clearly and others don’t hear anything. SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 39 photo : elisa rizo Intimate History of Humanity Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (b. 1966, Malabo) is an essayist, poet, narrator, playwright, and social analyst from Equatorial Guinea, undoubtedly one of the leading voices of the contemporary literature of his country. Some of his most important works from the 1990s and early 2000s are included in the anthology Letras Transversales: Obras Escogidas (forthcoming in 2012). He has been an invited speaker at many conferences and universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of journals and blogs. See his interview on page 41 of this issue. The Name of God Is Christ The name of God is Christ when the world decries its state. – Do you understand me, girl? – Yes, I understand what a madman says. The beasts put their feet in the fire and the alarm sounds in Belgrade for the Hutus to pick up their machete. – Do you understand now, girl? – Yes, and it worries me. Two children have died in Africa, only two, and the crying embarrasses the UN because their money doesn’t buy anything anymore. – Do you understand any of this, girl? – I cry. Goodbye, Guinea, Goodbye I went singing in solitude a song of love and oblivion the marks my feet left in the sand, which the waves erased little by little. The last time that I would live, solitude, distance, the last time that...

Five Poems

COVER FEATURE SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 37 photo : jon salmon Marcelo Ensema Nsang (b. 1947) is a poet and Claretian priest. He’s written several books of Claretian history, and his poetry has appeared in Equatorial Guinea’s most notable anthologies, but he has yet to publish a collection of his own poems. During the late 1970s he was incarcerated by Macías on three occasions and was still in prison when Obiang overthrew him in the 1979 coup. His life and poetry are featured in the documentary Kilometer Zero, which premiered at the Poetry Parnassus in London in June 2012. Instant Occasionally, like now, time becomes a sea of squid and tangles the days with its watery tentacles: their center dissolves and their edges and contours barely stay solid. It doesn’t exist. The air doesn’t dance its coy jig through the forest, breath doesn’t stroke life, dreams don’t populate the imagination with feverous breaths. No one exists. I was born millions of years ago, at least. Or maybe it was a recent yesterday or maybe I live in the future and the body is still an invention without patent . . . Yesterday doesn’t exist. Nor tomorrow. Today is a word not yet verbalized, that doesn’t even fit in the grammar of time. It’s the instant . . . The journey begins with the feet in white and the hands raising a booty of shadow, like a running account with nothing on the scale. It’s the zero hour of all desire, the zero time of all principle, the zero kilometer of existence. (Because God is, perhaps, the immense zero and the capital instant where everything resides in the present: from the beginning to the tips of his hands and me – a man – like a project inaugurated on promise. Offering I am the bread and the wine. I am the farmer and the vintner: and I have chopped clear my parcel of land and I know of the color – bush by bush – of the mandrakes each morning and individually. I am the farmer, the yucca and cocoyam. I have tired with the sun and, in the afternoon, I have argued the stature of the palm with the last rebellious bird and I lowered it level with my still: its milk-sweet life squeezed out drop by drop. It grew bitter, stubborn in my wineskins. Later its potency flowed to my head, each machete chop, to counteract the sweat of my hands and stroke the voiceless fear of each sorrow drowning in the current of toasted corn: I am the vintner, the palm tree and its wine. I am the farmer, the yucca and cocoyam. I am my own offering. Poetry from Equatorial Guinea Five Poems Marcelo Ensema Nsang Translator’s note: The set of three poems about Malabo on page 38, known as Santa Isabel before Macías’s re-Africanization of the country’s toponyms, was greatly assisted by a Poetry Translation Centre workshop, where I translated these poems in late 2010. 38 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Santa Isabel Plaza de España The tired afternoon falls over a rhythm of palm trees clad in spring, human, a scattered voice. Above, the moon rounds its silver and, enamored, spins its gratitude – starry light swerves between the coupling of harnesses – through the gothic cypresses that toll the bells. Market River of joy full of the very thing played only by this Stradivarius of beings, trampoline that launches us from the pole of artifice to pristine contact with the virgin, packed bustle of naked Africa. . . . Protocol of baskets and tables, blood clots, deceit, yucca and the solemn fraternity in the act of being emptied and filled in between laughter, drawing coins without currency, rain of ancient sun on their backs. Lean out – by the skin of the day – into that open custom of exchange, a life running through skirts. Point Cristina & Point Fernanda Album of doves that comes to coo the sister couple who sleep in the sea. The air in the trees starts to play mime and comb, kiss and madrigal. Light. Calm. Silence. Waves, nothing more. . . . and the two sisters, wives of the sea. Three Poems Raquel Ilonbé Raquel Ilonb...

Chondritic-like xenon trapped in Archean rocks: A possible signature of the ancient atmosphere

Ancient sedimentary rocks may have retained a record of the past atmospheric composition. We present evidence for the geological preservation of remnants of the Archean atmosphere. Hydrothermal quartz containing fluid inclusions from a core drilled in 3.5 Ga-old terrains at North Pole, (Western Australia), has a Ar–Ar plateau age of 3.0 ± 0.2 Ga. An Archean age is confirmed independently by 130Ba– 130Xe dating of fluid inclusions. Xenon trapped in the present sample and in 3.5 Ga-old barite from the same locality (Pujol et al., 2009; Srinivasan, 1976) presents an isotopic composition intermediate between the atmospheric composition and that of chondritic, or solar, xenon. In contrast, the stable isotopes of neon and krypton are isotopically atmospheric. This observation suggests that the well known but unexplained enrichment of heavy Xe isotopes in the atmosphere relative to cosmochemical (chondritic or solar) end-members was progressive, and not complete ≥ 3 Ga ago. This Xe isotopic fractionation might have taken place during prolongated irradiation of the atmosphere by the ancient Sun.

Ancient Sun Cults: Understanding Religious Rite e in Terms of Developmental Psychology

Animistic attitudes towards natural objects as prevailing forms of understanding nature and reality are found in all pre-modern societies. The sun and moon, like other physical objects, are understood in terms of animate and conscious beings or persons. Ancient peoples felt that they had a personal relationship to the heavenly bodies, worshipped them as gods and offered them sacrifices to feed them. The sun cults of the Aztecs and the ancient Egyptians, chosen as typical examples to demonstrate these phenomena, can only be explained in the context of animistic, magical belief systems. Developmental psychology of cognitive structures explains the prevalence of these belief systems as parts of the cognitive development of mankind. Thus, developmental psychology can explain the ubiquity of animistic thinking and sun cults across pre-modern societies as far back as the stone ages. The rise of formal operations among the educated classes in 17th century Europe accounts for the surpassing of magical-animistic thinking and the rise of mechanical philosophy, of the mechanical theory of heavens and of the physical sciences. The beginning of physical sciences is the end of animistic thinking and solar cults.

Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage

Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage

Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage by Marianne McDonald

Reviews279 The Playboy of the Western World, the exhilarating guile with which O'Casey interweaves political rhetoric with the low comedy of the pub in The Plough and the Stars, the poetic transfiguration of Saint Joan during her trial in Rouen or the calculated ambivalence of her Epilogue, the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral and its power to lift its audience to a crisis of emotion before the abrupt and prosaic cut-off of the Knights' address after the murder, Beatie's extraordinary moment of transformation in Roots from dumb parroting to self-discovery, in Amadeus the sudden surge of Mozart's music following the repellent image of his person as presented on the stage. Performance criticism signals the style of the drama and seeks its lifeblood. This will not be the last study whose aim it is to get to grips with the British drama of this lively century, but it is full of stimulating ideas and succeeds in illuminating an extraordinarily wide range of material. It is an account, the best we have to date, that will trigger our thinking for a few years to come. J. L. STYAN Northwestern University Marianne McDonald. Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Pp. 238. $35.00. There are two ways of indicating the power of Greek drama to modern audiences. The first is to try to recover the terms of the original performances in all their startling strangeness, and find at least equivalents for their effects in modern productions. These include the use of only three male actors, masks, a male chorus, spoken, chanted, and sung poetry, music, dance, the physical and symbolic space of the ampitheater and so on. Here one would find, with more than Brechtian power and complexity, a built-in Verfremdungseffekt that would startle into life all but the most torpid audiences. One would recover, for example, the astonishing implications of the fact that the same actor, in Sophokles, plays the feminine Deineira and the macho Herakles, or, in the Electra, the son Orestes and the mother he slays (actually giving out his "mother's" death-scream), and, in Euripides' Bacchae, in a reversal of this, the son Pentheus and his mother and killer, Agave. (The head of Pentheus that Agave carries is surely the same actor's previous mask.) Or the brilliant use of three actors in the Oedipus at Colonus where the Theseus figure, as he grows in stature, is played successively by the tritagonist, deuteragonist , and protagonist, the Oedipus voice (spirit) finally emerging through the Theseus mask as Oedipus bestows his spirit on Athens. Greek plays were performative, not "literary" texts, and we lose much of their meaning as well as their power when we ignore their performative terms. Indeed, the "academic" or "conventional" productions Marianne McDonald deplores are distortions of the originals greater than the modern productions she applauds. It is the unsettling unlikeness of the ancient dramas to our experience of the theater or the modern world that is creatively "alienating." The second way is that which is described in Ancient Sun, Modern 280Comparative Drama Light. This is for writers and directors mostly to ignore the original performative terms of the dramatic texts, to extract from them their stories, myths, or themes, and then to adapt these in brilliant, contemporary , and innovative forms. Taking an extremely diverse and provocative group of productions from Japan, the United States, Germany, Greece, Britain, and Ireland, McDonald effectively communicates to the reader her enthusiasm for their methods and achievements. She is especially successful, I think in conveying to the reader the experience of Suzuki Tadashi's art and that of his leading actress, Shiraishi. Here it is the unexpected likeness of the Greek texts to the "issues" of the modern world that is vitalizing. The book, then, is less about the performance of Greek drama than about its continuing validity as potent myth in the modern imagination— the subject also of George Steiner's Antigenes. McDonald's concern is to make the myths and themes of Greek drama address the problematic modern world: to remove the plays from the pedestal of High Eternal Truth and...

Neon isotope studies of Fayetteville and Kapoeta meteorites and clues to ancient solar activity

Pyroxene grain-size separates, from both dark (D) and light (L) portions of two gas-rich meteorites, Fayetteville and Kapoeta, were chemically etched to remove the surficial solar wind (SW). These samples were studied mass spectrometrically for neon to decipher the long-term average solar flare (SF) neon composition and fluxes as well as the solar cosmic ray (SCR) proton fluxes from the ancient Sun during the solar system formation. Based on the results from Fayetteville and Kapoeta, we deduce that the SF-Ne composition from the ancient Sun is 20 22 = 11.6 ± 0.2 and 21 22 = 0.030 , which is similar to that deduced from our lunar sample studies (Nautiyal et al., 1981, 1986). The SF, SCR and galactic cosmic ray (GCR) produced neon isotopes are resolved into their individual components in the neon mixtures of these etched pyroxenes under the assumption that GCR-produced neon in pyroxenes from the dark and light phases of Fayetteville and Kapoeta are similar. We find significant excess of 21Ne produced by SCR protons ( p) in these etched pyroxenes. This observed excess 21Ne can be explained if the SCR proton fluxes from the ancient Sun are considered to be about three orders of magnitude higher than those from the contemporary Sun. This inference is supported by the significant excess of implanted SF- 20Ne ( E > 1 MeV/amu) observed here in the irradiated pyroxenes of Fayetteville and Kapoeta. The agreement of p ( E > 10 MeV/amu)/ Ne ( E > 1 MeV/amu) ratio for the ancient solar flares deduced in this study with the same ratio for the contemporary solar flares deduced from lunar sample studies suggests that these observed neon excesses were most probably produced by the solar flare irradiation of these grains during surface irradiation on the regolith of the meteorite parent bodies during the early solar system.