About Sirius

[Shoulder_of_Orion]

Hello everyone,

I saw Thunderbolts' video "Gareth Samuel: Seeing Precession Differently | Space News" yesterday and I have a question about the star Sirius.

In this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdLxP-w1LGg Gareth talks about problems with current model of precession and problem number 3 (which starts at 6:50 in the video) is about Sirius not moving with other stars. My question is: Is this a fact? If so, how is that possible?

I might have missed some exposure of an error of mainstream astronomy, because until yesterday I thought all the stars are moving about 1 degree every seventy years (relative to the equinox). For example, in the Stellarium software, Sirius moves like the other stars.

If the star is not moving, that mean Canis major constellation is slowly but significantly deformed by stationary Sirius over time. Wouldn't this be provable beyond all doubt? Thanks for the opinions and help.

[Aardwolf]

If I understand correctly, it's possible if you interpret the "wobbling" of the Earth as not the Earth "wobbling", but that the whole solar system is following a helical pathway and our sun and Sirius are following the same path but on exactly opposite sides. Similar to binary stars but offset in some way. I haven't quite looked at the logistics but it's likely this could solve the issues regarding the Tycho catalogue having half of its measurements producing impossible negative parallaxes. That would actually make perfect sense.

Of course this is all heresy to the mainstream as this motion can have no gravitational explanation as there isn't anything to orbit during our spiral pathway! It can only be explained in EU terms so joins a long list of unexplained anomalies.

[johnm33]

Got more heresy if you want it, Sirius still rises in about the same place and the same time as it did for the Egyptians, so it clearly does not precess. Quite how it remains 'on station' escapes me the best idea I have about it is that it is either in the same energetic 'duct' that 'we' are or it is in one tightly wound with it, in either case it is 'upstream' so nearer the flow in that 'duct' which comes from the galactic core. I suspect both are experiencing multiple helical orbitals around other strands and that sirius is much closer than the mainstream think. If you can think that the voyagers are perhaps at the limit of the suns sheath then sirius's may be adjacent to it. So it's very proximity is why it's so bright.
If you look at some of Gareths other videos I think Walter Crittendale and Jim Weninger touch on this, and apparently this was known to the ancients and some of it is elucidated in 'Hamlets Mill'.
I feel I'm wrong about this but can't figure out why or come up with a better answer.

[Shoulder_of_Orion]

First of all, thank you both of you guys for your answers. I'm sure I'll come back to it once I dive deeper in this matter. However, I must say we didn't understand each other perfectly, so I will try to reformulate my question better.

My issue isn't a concept of the cause of precession. I'm not there yet. By saying: "how is that possible?" I mean, how is it possible that star catalogs see Sirius moving about 1 degree per seventy years and work with an accuracy of arc seconds at the same time? Aren’t those catalogs based on actual observations? And if Sirius stays still relatively to other stars of Canis major, it means that the constellation got a lot of deformation since the telescope was discovered.

I just failed to find anything solid about wrongdoing concerning the catalogs.

[Aardwolf]

My issue isn't a concept of the cause of precession. I'm not there yet. By saying: "how is that possible?" I mean, how is it possible that star catalogs see Sirius moving about 1 degree per seventy years and work with an accuracy of arc seconds at the same time? Aren’t those catalogs based on actual observations?

Interpretation. The existing interpretation monitors the movement of the stars and under the assumption our sun is travelling in a straight line, the shift of the whole starfield (say 1 degree over 72 years) is assumed to effect ALL of the background because its just the movement of the Earth. Against this stars have their own proper motion. It could just be interpreted that Sirius has a proper motion which I assume largely offsets the precession. Alternatively the sun is moving around a helix. Visually it’s the same effect so no errors would be found, they just both fit.

And if Sirius stays still relatively to other stars of Canis major, it means that the constellation got a lot of deformation since the telescope was discovered

All constellations distort anyway so picking out one star doesn’t prove or disprove anything.

I just failed to find anything solid about wrongdoing concerning the catalogs.

You won’t, apart from the bizarre fact that half the Tycho catalogue has negative parallax. I think potentially the shifting of the sun at the "base" of the parallax measurement as it follows the helix could be causing this.

[johnm33]

Aren’t those catalogs based on actual observations?

When something, like a fact, conflicts with things that everybody knows for sure then obviously the fact is wrong probably due to faulty measurments made by others in the past. I'm not a fan of the binary system model [ Iwould expect a binary companion to precess faster than any other star] but have to aknowledge the scope of the work put in in attempting to understand 'our' progress through the galaxy. How can we not know this?
http://www.binaryresearchinstitute.org/ ... date.shtml

[Shoulder_of_Orion]

Interpretation. The existing interpretation monitors the movement of the stars and under the assumption our sun is travelling in a straight line, the shift of the whole starfield (say 1 degree over 72 years) is assumed to effect ALL of the background because its just the movement of the Earth. Against this stars have their own proper motion. It could just be interpreted that Sirius has a proper motion which I assume largely offsets the precession. Alternatively the sun is moving around a helix. Visually it’s the same effect so no errors would be found, they just both fit.

I'm not talking about precession model but actual measurements. Again, if Sirius not precess like other stars (basic assumption of Gareth's video) it should be seen tearing away from other stars about 50 arc seconds per year. Proper motion is reported to be relatively high in case of Sirius but it is still matter of more or less 1 arc second per year (for both right Right Ascension and Declination). This is matter of measured data, nothing else.

https://theskylive.com/sky/stars/sirius ... joris-star

And I'm not expert in parallax theory or measurement, but it seems to me it is matter of fractions of a arc seconds compared to a little less than a minute of precession of the equinox per year. So I still can't say "Sirius doe's not precess" however you pointed out lot of interesting stuff which I didn't know about. I have something to process now. Thank you for your time!

[Shoulder_of_Orion]

From the article: Long before the GP-B data was received we wrote Stanford and told them to expect some wacky signals that would appear to mimic precession. One of the subsequent public releases has stated that the signals received do indeed appear to “mimic” the very signals the spacecraft was trying to avoid with its perfect gyros placed far above a so-called wobbling earth.

Well, I don't know how that "wacky signals" relate to the actually observed movement of stars, but if they set up the telescope out of expected "earth wobbling" and they still measured "precessional motion" maybe is the whole earth wobbling model wrong. However, this doesn't change anything about what I wrote in my last reply to "johnm33". So I have to be skeptical about Gareth's video for now.

When something, like a fact, conflicts with things that everybody knows for sure then obviously the fact is wrong probably due to faulty measurments made by others in the past.

If this is the case then, in my humble opinion, someone should challenge catalogs and star maps with strong arguments even before challenging the overall model.

You pointed out some interesting things to me I have to process (or should I say precess? haha) Thank you for your time, man.

[nick c]

Sirius still rises in about the same place and the same time as it did for the Egyptians,

I don't know what is meant by this statement, but there is nothing mysterious about Sirius' position in the sky. Halley in the 18th C was the first to measure Sirius' proper motion. He compared the positon of Sirius with the position as reported in the 2nd C in Ptolemy's Almagest, and found that since that time Sirius had moved 30 arc minutes or a half degree, a distance of about the diameter of the full Moon. Sirius is slowly moving but by comparison to other "fixed" stars it is speeding along. That is because it is one of the closest stars to our solar system.

Note 1. : Proper motion as described above, is different from parallax motion, which is an illusion created by comparing a star's positon taken at 6 month intervals, that allows for the trigonometric calculation of a nearby star's distance. Parallax measurements don't need to have proper motion taken into consideration since it would be unnoticeable in a 6 moth period, although the techniques are now so well developed that they no doubt are capable of taking both into consdisideration.

Note 2 : There is a genuine anomaly with Sirius and that is with its historical appearance. Today it is obvious as an extremely bright bluish white star, but there are numerous ancient sources which describe Sirius as being red. Whether or not those descriptions actually describe Sirius' appearance at that time is still being debated.

[Brigit]

I sense that you are all talking about whether Sirius is tracking the same Birkeland Current as the sun.

[Arcmode]

Why is there so much confusion, even from a popular EU promoter, about a basic question of astronomical observation?

There is a problem with EU people jumping on ideas that seem to support their cause without enough real investigation of the claims. It's discrediting, dilutes valuable material and can easily become an unfounded assumption on which to build new 'facts.'

[johnm33]

I sense that you are all talking about whether Sirius is tracking the same Birkeland Current as the sun.

Either the same one, and immediatly behind 'us', or one mutually wound with it, is my thinking.
nick c. , At least one of us is wrong, I'm checking my thinking and even looking at similar sources my view is changing [there were things my mind, having no reference points, must have just glossed over before], for curiosities sake what other stars were measured by those two and how much have they moved? I will get back about this, I can scarcely believe 'we' don't know Earths trajectory or even it's neighbourhood for certain.

[nick c]

John,
No doubt, there is a lot yet to be learned about the motions of the Sun and local stars and their associated Birkeland currents.
But Sirius does have a measurable proper motion.
(Definition of proper motion: the part of the apparent motion of a fixed star that is due to its actual movement in space relative to the sun.)

Sirius is slowly moving toward the South Celestial Pole,
see: https://earthsky.org/tonight/sirius-fut ... pole-star/

Sirius' apparent motion (that is as seen from Earth) is partly due to precession and partly due to the star's proper motion

[johnm33]

This, https://binaryresearchinstitute.org/srg ... arch.shtml is from the site which convinced me there's something very different about sirius.
For a broader picture try https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2020/02 ... ng-sirius/
I'm happy to be wrong if I can at least nail something down, Parallax seems flawed, red shift has three or more causes, space seems to be curved not in the Einsteinian sense but by currents passing through it, so I have no idea where I am in the grand scheme of things. It seems dependent entirely on assumptions made or the authority of those making them that we have the 'picture' we have, or not. So Sirius is somewhere between 362 AU and 8.6 LY away. There's an image in here, https://www.astropix.com/html/observing ... e_pup.html that implies it's companions orbital plane is inclined at about 30deg. to 'us'
The 'ancients' had it as a companion star of some sort, some think that means a binary system some that it follows a similar trajectory?
Looking at this image https://cdn.eso.org/images/thumb700x/eso0303c.jpg it would seem that 61Cygni should have a similar movement?

[Holger Isenberg]

It's a difficult topic. I also wondered about the lack of visible much different proper motion than other stars in astronomy software and why at the same time the Sirius heliacal rising location on the horizon hasn't changed much since 5000 years, only by about 1 degree maybe.

About astronomy software you have to ask what's the base assumption the software makes and what timebase does it use? Is it using the UTC clock as base which is constantly adjusted over time with additional leap seconds within the recent few decades to keep in sync with Earth's solar movement.? Is it making an assumption that the aphelion and perihelion locations of Earth are constant over time and are not moving in relation to the equinox location in orbit? The old Egyptians didn't had that problem of finding the timebase, they just used the planets's and Moon's location in front of the background stars for a clear definition.

About the heliacal rising location on the horizon: Because of Sirius' location in relation to the ecliptic and equator, the heliacal rising location is less affected by the wobbling over the 25000 years. What changes more is the date within the year and less the location on the horizon. So the more interesting question is to get precise information about the day of the heliacal rising in the past. The question then is, the day in which calendar? A solar calendar based on the equinox or a calendar based on the Sirius midnight culmination day or a calendar based on the Earth perihelion?