Lhe high priests of the Dogons, an African tribe from Mali, knew of the existence of certain stars even before they were discovered by European telescopes. The Dogons is the name of a people living on the dried up Bandiagara plateau in Mali and who in their tradition show a fantastic cosmogony. The Dogons tell us that the great ancestor Nommo would have come, millennia ago, from a planet orbiting Sirius C that we do not yet know. They know that Sirius B circles its elliptical orbit around Sirius A in 50 years and that is why these Dogons celebrate every fifty years, the “feast of Sigui” whose ceremonies aim to regenerate the World, hence its importance, undoubtedly so that the harvests are good. The next Sigui ceremony will take place in 2027. The two French ethnologists limit themselves to describing the Dogon myths without addressing the thorny problem of their origin.
However, it was first the German Friedrich Wilhem Bessel (1784-1846) who was the first, in 1844, to suspect the existence of this 2nd star, to explain the unusual oscillations of the apparent movement of Sirius A, then that the theoretical orbit of this star Sirius B, as we know, invisible to the naked eye, was calculated by Peter in 1851 and its period of revolution was specified as 50,090 years by Van Den Bas in 1960. But the Dogons knew it already them, and how did they know that the period of revolution was precisely 50 years.
They worshiped the star Sirius, the brightest star. Generally called the Dog Star, it lies about 7 light years from our Sun. Sirius was actually a system of three stars: a large star (Sirius A), then a second star (Sirius B), tiny, very dense and almost invisible, and a third less heavy sun (Sirius C). The second sun was described as very heavy despite its small size. It was orbiting the great star we call Sirius A with A at a focus of an ellipse, hardly conceivable information for a quasi-prehistoric people. They also described how A rotated on its axis. Intersecting the orbits of these three suns, the orbit of the creature's planet was "egg-shaped" and A would take fifty years to traverse its orbit.
The French team recorded their story and later published it. At the time, scientists thought Sirius was a binary star system, although some astronomers speculated that there were three stars. The subject was forgotten until the 70s when scientists using the latest most powerful telescopes were finally able to get good pictures of Sirius' system. To their amazement it was a three-star system with a large sun, a very heavy and almost invisible white dwarf star, and a less powerful third star.
Using computers, astronomers then calculated that a planet that was in the position that had been described by the Dogons would have an egg-shaped orbit and would take fifty years to complete a revolution. What the Dogons had explained at least forty years before our more powerful telescopes could even ascertain the existence of Sirius' third star.
Dogon, how this world came into being: Cosmogony of the Dogons of Mali
🛒 I order mine 👇
Release Date | 2015-10-01T00:00:01Z |
Language | Français |
Number Of Pages | 272 |
Publication Date | 2015-10-01T00:00:01Z |