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T he Secret of Cygnus X-3 Atlantis Rising Mag...

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Ancient Mysteries, T he Unexplained, and Future Science
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SEPT./OCT. 2010 #8 3

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TH E SECR ET OF CYGN U S X-3 IP AD U SER S Download Go o d R ea d er App IN TH IS ISSU E ALTER N ATIVE AR CH EOLOGY Ice Age Civilization in the Bahamas? BY DR . GR EG LITTLE Water Wizards of Ancient Arizona BY F R AN K JOSEPH The Pursuit of Ancient Precision BY AR LAN AN DR EWS Alien Giants & Alien DN A Or N ot? BY Z ECH AR IA SITCH IN ALTER N ATIVE SCIEN CE N ikola Tesla & the God Particle BY M AR C J. SEIF ER , Ph.D. The Secret of Cygnus X-3 BY AN DR EW COLLIN S CLASSIC ASTR OLOGY The Phases of the M oon BY JU LIE LOAR COM M EN TAR Y H idden in Plain Sight BY WILLIAM B. STOECKER EAR LY R AYS Why Should We Care About This Very Distant Star? BY AN DR EW COLLIN S

Recently the pres tigious journals Nature and Science announced that Cygnus X-3, either a black hole or neutron s tar located 30,000 light years away in the cons tellation of Cygnus , the celes tial s wan, has now been s hown to produce periodic burs ts of high energy gamma rays , the firs t confirmed s ource in the Milky Way galaxy (Tavani et al, Nature, 2009 & Fermi LAT Collaboration et al, Science, 2009. See als o Reddy, 2009). This is a revelation, for extreme cos mic radiation of this type is normally only as s ociated with extra-galactic objects s uch as quas ars , powered by s us pected s upermas s ive black holes at the heart of dis tant galaxies (als o known as AGNs , active galactic nuclei). Scientis ts now believe that monitoring Cygnus X-3 in its role as a microquas ar, i.e., a s maller quas ar ins ide our galaxy, might well lead to a better unders tanding of the production of gamma rays in quas ars .
This announcement is, presumably, wonderful news for astrophysics, but why is it so important to the person in the street? Well, the answer lies in the fact that Cygnus X-3s production of high energy gamma rays is merely one facet of its extraordinary influence on the solar system, for it is known to spew out electromagnetic radiation across a broad spectrum of frequencies, from radio waves and infrared radiation to higher frequency X-rays and cosmic radiation. This is because Cygnus X-3 has additionally been proposed as the galaxys firs t microblazar, a galactic form of a so-called blazar. C o s m ic Gu n B a rrel So what exactly is a blazar? Electromagnetic radiation and cosmic particles across a whole range of frequencies are produced by black holes and neutron stars as they accrete gaseous matter, generally from close proximity stars, which they then use to create a highly energized ring of ionized gas that encircles the star around its equator and is thought to be the source of the high energy gamma rays now being monitored from Eart h. This so-called accretion disk feeds the star, which every so often powers up by emitting unimaginable jets of plasma (ionized gas) that extend in opposite directions along the stars axis of rotation. These advance into the stellar medium for tens, if not hundreds, of light years in distance, accelerating cosmic particles close to the speed of light and at the same time

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N ews M ore N ews Even M ore N ews Still M ore N ews GR EATER DIM EN SION S M usic from the Other Side BY JOH N CH AM BER S IN TER N ET N EWS Inews JEAN E M AN N IN G Cayce R eadings Crystal-ized Energy Invention BY JEAN E M AN N IN G LOST H ISTOR Y Lost Secrets Of The Bruton Vault BY STEVEN SOR A The Other Shroud BY PH ILIP COPPEN S M ICH AEL CR EM O M odern H umans Over Three M illion Years Ago BY M ICH AEL A. CR EM O PU BLISH ER 'S LETTER N ew Oasis on the World Wide Web BY J. DOU GLAS KEN YON R EADER F OR U M Script M ysteries & M ore VIDEO & DVD U nseen Powers Within BY M AR SH A OAKS ADVER TISM EN TS

causing so many collisions inside the jets that the effects can be monitored down here on Earth, usually as X-rays (bearing in mind that it takes 30,000 earth years for even light to reach us from Cygnus X-3, and thus any other slower waves or particles will take even longer to get here). What makes a quasar into a blazar is the sheer fact that one of those twin jets is aligned near perfectly with our line of sight. Imagine looking down the end of a twelve-bore shotgun as one of its barrels is discharged. H aving been expelled, the buckshot emerges as a tight cone that gradually expands and loses energy and momentum the further away it gets from the gun. N ow consider that a blazar is like looking down the end of a vast cosmic gun barrel which, although many light years away, still sprays you with cosmic buckshot in the form of electromagnetic radiation and high-energy cosmic particlesnot enough to cause you or the planet any noticeable harm but enough for this cosmic bombardment to be detected by scientific instrumentation. Blazars are likely to be s upermassive black holes at the heart of distant galaxies. H owever, we now have one in our own neighborhood, and this is Cygnus X-3, which although 30,000 light years away is actually quite close in astronomical terms (Just to give you some idea of distance from here to the center of the M ilky Way galaxy is 26,000 light years. H ere astrophysicis ts suspect there is a supermassive black holelabelled Sagittarius Awhich has been in a dormant state for at least the last 20,000 years). Cygnus X-3s role as a producer of high energy gamma rays, as well as its more controversial role as the galaxys first microblazar (i.e. a local blazar), makes sense of something else we know about this strange star. It is one of the only known sources of cosmic rays, i.e., extremely high energy cosmic particles. C o s m ic P a rticles What was so amazing about these incoming cosmic particles from Cygnus X-3 is that they were able to penetrate solid rock for a depth of hundreds of meters before finally colliding with localized atoms to create secondary particles known as muons. N o other type of cosmic ray was known to do this, causing scientists to assume, perhaps rightly, that these particles were unique to science and perhaps even exotic in nature (i.e., they contradicted the standard model of physics). These mysterious cosmic particles quickly gained the appellation cygnons, although this was soon changed to the less potent but equally revealing cygnets, conjuring the vision of them being what Professor John G. Cramer of Washington U niversity saw in 198 5 in terms of children of the swan (Cramer, 198 5), the swan being the Cygnus constellations most popular identification in European star lore. Scientists will t ell you that the existence of cygnets was never confirmed, so the evidence of their discovery at particle detectors such as N U SEX beneath M ont Blanc and Soudan in M innesota has to be ignored; indeed, scientists who wrote papers on this subject were often ridiculed by their contemporaries. H owever, I can assure you that the cygnets from Cygnus never stopped coming, and that their detection has continued at facilities around the world, including the Soudan M ine in M innesota (Allison et al, 1999). An cien t As tro n o m ies Again, none of this should be of even the slightest interest to the person in the st reet. Even at a distance of 30,000 light years, Cygnus X-3 is so far away that why should we care? Well, perhaps you should care, for the attraction of the Cygnus constellation goes back to the earliest cave art. F or instance, in 2000 German archaeoastronomer Dr M ichael R appenglck of M unich U niversity identified the presence of the Cygnus constellation among abstract rock art in the deepest chamber of the famous Lascaux cave in southern F rance (R appenglck, 2004). This was the setting for strange rites conducted by our Palaeolithic ancestors as much as 17,000 years ago. It is also toward Cygnus, known more popularly as the N orthern Cross, that religious buildings and structures have been aligned ever since the very first great stone complexes were erected in southeast Turkey around 12,000 years ago. On top of this, the Giza Pyramids, the N eolithic passage grave of N ewgrange in Ireland, H indu temples in India, Olmec centers in M exico, native American mound sites in Ohio, and even a great stone circle in the shape of a boat in Sweden, all seem to reflect a strong interest in the Cygnus constellation (s ee Collins, 2006 & Collins, 2009). Why is this? Why so much interest in this one constellation? The answer lies initially in the fact that some 17,000 years ago the stars of Cygnus occupied the position of the northern celestial pole. This is the pivot point of the heavens around which the heavens are seen to turn as viewed from anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Secondly, Cygnus is located in the M ilky Way in the region of the so-called Cygnus R ift where the starry stream divides into two separate rivers of stars due to a long, dark area of stellar debris, once seen as the entrance to a primordial sky-world, or heaven, where life began, souls were created, and the dead entered an afterlife among the stars (see Collins, The Cygnus Mystery, 2006). Beyond all this was the obvious cruciform appearance of the star cluster, or asteris m, invoking the image not just of a bird in flight but also a celestial crossone that in Christian times quickly became identified with the Cross of Calvary, the One True Cross, rediscovered on Golgotha M ount by the Empress H elena in the fourth century AD. I See C o s m ic R a ys Yet there might be another reason why Cygnus became so important to the ancient mindset, and that is the influence of cosmic rays on both the body and mind. As early as 1973 science writer and astronomer Carl Sagan proposed that cosmic rays reaching Earth from some far off neutron star might well have been responsible for

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unexpected and quite sudden leaps in human evolution (Sagan, 1973). N ormally, such changes are attributed to more mundane causes, such as diets, environmental factors, and even simple human necessit y. H owever, a growing number of scientists are beginning to consider that cosmic rays might have played a role in human evolution, causing either mutations in DN A, or even the deletion of DN A sequences, which are then carried through to subsequent generations. This is possible; yet even if it were true, pinning down the exact source of any incoming cosmic rays responsible for such mutations is problematic, as nearly all cosmic particles are positively charged which means that they are deflected left, right, and center by intense magnetic fields, both out in the galaxy and inside the solar system. Only those particles that possess a neutral charge avoid being affected in this way and s o reach us directly from their source. H owever, tracing their source via their trajectory has proved a tricky process, with no confirmed candidates to date. In fact, other than the cygnets arriving directly from Cygnus X-3, there are only a few other possible sources of cosmic rays inside our galaxy, the most likely being an X-ray binary star called H ercules X-1, located around 20,000 light years away. It is reasonable to conclude that if cosmic rays do affect human evolution, then the cygnets of Cygnus X-3 have played some role in this process, particularly as it is suspected that this star has been in its current state of spontaneous, periodic activity for an estimated 700,000 years (M arti, 2005). This is when mankinds direct forerunners are known to have reached Britain. Although these so-called hominids (or hominins as the scientists like us to refer to them today) preceded the N eanderthals by as much as 500,000 years, they would appear to have been not unlike modern humans. As has been determined from a number of breathtaking discoveries in a thick clay layer dating back 700,000 years, exposed along a stretch of beach at Pakefield in Suffolk, these hominids used quite sophisticated hand tools made of flint (Kinver, 2005). Was it around this time that cosmic rays from Cygnus X-3 first began affecting human evolution? It is plausible. Yet more important is attempting to unravel Cygnuss overall impact on humanity. Learn this and you will perhaps answer why the constellation became so important to our Palaeolithic ancestors, when humanity was still creating fabulous art in the caves of Western Europe. The key, I feel, is the simple fact that we can see cosmic rays. This was first realized on the Apollo space missions during the 1960s. When as tronauts attempted to go to sleep, they began seeing flashes of light before their eyes. This occurred either with their eyes open or closed; it didnt matter which. In-flight experiments on subsequent missions determined that what the astronauts were experiencing were cosmic rays producing a burst of light as they decayed en route through the vitreous part of the eye. This effect had not really been noticed before, simply because down here on Earth the upper atmosphere shelters us from the brunt of cosmic radiation hitting the planet. M oreover, we are rarely in a pitch black environment in which it might be possible to witness a cosmic ray pass through our eyes. Yet it probably does occur, and more frequently than is realized, just ask a caver who spends long periods underground. They will tell you that they frequently witness unaccountable flashes of light that seem objective but are in fact probably only occurring inside the head. I even found that miners who used to work in the Soudan iron mine in M innesota, before it became the site of an underground particle detector, would occasionally see weird flashes of light in the total darkness. Were these, in fact, cosmic rays inbound from Cygnus X-3, like those registered by the Soudan facility in the 198 0s? Id like to think it was possible. What all this means is that if you were hundreds of meters below the surface of the planet, deep inside a cave, and you witnessed a blue-white flash before your eyes, the chances are that this was, in fact, a cosmic ray. Yet since only a tiny percentage of cosmic rays penetrate the earth, there has to be a small chance that what you experienced was a particle inbound from Cygnus X-3; and this is important, for it tells us somet hing about why Cygnus might have attracted the attention of our distant ancestors. In time those who occupied the caves for religious purposes would, I sense, have realized, eventually, that the flashes were more frequent, or pronounced, when the Cygnus constellation was overhead, just as cygnets were found to be more easily detected when Cygnus was high in the sky. If so, then this might well have helped forge a spiritual link, not just with this particular cluster of stars, but also the area of the M ilky Way which they occupied, i.e., the Cygnus R ift. In time, a connection between the light triggering process underground and the Cygnus constellation would surely have led to cosmological myths featuring both the astronomical position of the asterism and its abstract form as a bird (or indeed a cross), identified most usually as a swan or goose flying, wings outstretched, down the M ilky Way. This avian form then became a symbol of divine knowledge and creative ins piration, explaining why perhaps the mythical song of the swan came to represent the divine source of inspiration for epic storytelling and poetry in H omeric tradition, H omer himself being referred to as the M aeonian Swan, or the Swan of M eander. The first mortal poet in Greek H ellenic tradition was Orpheus, who was not only H omers mythical ancestor but also one of the identities of the swan of Cygnus in classical star lore. Orpheus was said to have been transformed into a swan and cast into the sky next to his beloved lyrethe constellation of Lyraafter his body was torn apart by the crazed female followers of the god Dionysius. In Pythagorean tradition, the souls of great poets were said to have become swans. The soul of Apollo, the god of music and song, was thought to have been transformed in this manner. The swan also became a symbol of poetry and inspiration in India, where in H indu tradition it is the vehicle of the

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goddess Saraswati, the consort of the creator god Brahma. Indeed, it was Saraswati who is said to have alerted her husband to the sound of the cosmic swan-goose hamsa , enabling him to effect the creation of the physical universe. In Vedic star lore, the stars of Cygnus were identified with the swan-goos e hamsa (Collins, 2006). Elsewhere in the world, the bird of Cygnus was seen as the creator of the cosmic egg that subsequently broke or opened to become the physical universe and everything within it. It is also likely t hat very similar cosmogonies, featuring birds that bring forth the physical world, were inspired by earlier traditions linking the stars of Cygnus with the idea of cosmic creation. Whether such conviction was either directly or indirectly influenced by visionary experiences, triggered by cosmic rays seen as flashes of light by Palaeolithic shamans deep inside caves, is debatable. H owever, at the root of many ancient cosmologies is, I believe, a profound connection with the Cygnus constellation; and confirmation that one of its stars, Cygnus X-3, produced bursts of high energy gamma rays has moved us closer to understanding its greater influence on both human evolution and the origins of the worlds earliest sky-religions. by admin - September 1st, 2010. F iled under: Alternative Science, Stories.

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