The star Canopus appears to be in a physical relation to the Sun, modulating the precession of the terrestrial equinox and other long term solar system rhythms. Although not a binary, Canopus seems to explain the Vedic theory that precession is caused by a binary star.
Canopus is 310 light years away and is 15,000 times more luminous than the Sun and the most intrinsically bright star within approximately 700 light years. Canopus is the brightest object for everything shown in this
atlas of the universe within 250 light years, and is located just outside this horizon. At galactic scale of 100,000 light years, Canopus is 1/300th of the galactic diameter away, and is the biggest object within 1/150th of the galaxy.
Canopus is on the Sun’s rotational axis, very close to the South Celestial Pole. This
diagram of precession of the South Polar stars shows how Canopus moves towards and away from the South Celestial Pole on an apparent path matching the precession period of 25765 years.
The wobble of precession, at the current rate, has happened about 175,000 times since the dawn of the solar system. It seems likely that Canopus has remained very close to the earth’s and the sun’s South Pole, and so to the South Pole of the whole solar system, for a very long time.
I do not know how stable the Canopus-Sol relation may have been over the life of the galaxy, but I suspect that Canopus and Sol have been together, perhaps with other stars in the region as shown at the 250LY atlas, for all of the five billion years since Sol came into being.
The size and location of Canopus justifies exploration of how it may be in some form of binary relation with stars around it including our solar system. If we imagine the sun in relation to Canopus, we see the direction of the solar axis is pointed straight at this whopper, 15,000 times as bright. I wonder if other nearby stars may have their axis pointed at Canopus too?
Seeing Canopus in this sense as a binary for the sun makes sense against the precession pattern. Precession is directly caused by luni-solar torque. However, it is legitimate to look at how precession is in harmonic resonance to larger gravitational relationships. A good example is the direct relation between the precession period and the Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune return cycle of 178.9 years, which is precisely 1/144th of the precession period, and one twelfth of the Zodiacal Age of 2147 years. These main bodies of the solar system, with the earth, exhibit the 'pulse of the sun' shown in the barycentre cardiograph. Looking at Canopus as the modulator of time can start to explain such mysterious gravitational relationships. Canopus looks to be part of an even bigger galactic gravitational relationship that is in a harmonic resonance with the solar system.
How I imagine this relation is that the solar system is effectively a satellite of Canopus. It is almost as though the earth’s axial wobble looks like a gyroscopic stabiliser for the overall Sun-Canopus relation, not in the aeronautic sense, but as part of the larger gravitational patterns of the galaxy.
This hypothesis explains some questions in archaeo-astronomy. Canopus is also known as Alpha Carinae and Agastya, and is the first star of the old Greek constellation Argo Navis, the Judeo-Christian Noah’s Ark and the Egyptian Barque of Osiris. I discussed its interesting constellational history at
Argo. The ideas here help to explain a number of the issues raised by Santillana and von Dechend in
Hamlet’s Mill, their study of how astronomy is embedded in ancient mythology. Their work can be expanded to also consider the Vedic Yuga, Jason and the Argonauts, the Norse theory of Yggdrasil the World Tree, and key ideas in the Bible.
The movement of Canopus towards and away from the South Celestial Pole is central to the Vedic theory of the Yuga, a 24,000 year cycle which reached its imagined low point in 500 AD. The moment on the precession cycle when Canopus is furthest from the Pole was about 1000AD, in rough alignment with the Vedic hypothesis of ascending Yuga cycle towards Canopus and descending Yuga cycle away from Canopus. The Vedic Golden Age corresponds to the period when the South Celestial Pole is close to Canopus. This explains why the Vedic astronomers insist on a binary system as the basis of precession, not that precession is physically caused by the binary relation with Canopus, but that precession is part of a larger harmonic gravitational resonance that characterises the entire solar system in its relation with Canopus.
I made a
diagram of the Yuga and the Age showing how the movement of Canopus fits into the mythology of the Golden Age and the Ages of the Zodiac.
The South Polar Star Chart shows the Large Magellanic Cloud is very close to the spot around which the Pole precesses. Hence the Sun-Canopus relationship may be part of an even bigger galactic structure. I would be interested to find out how the Milky Way and the Magellanic Cloud interact, and whether the Cloud has remained at a southerly position for the Sun and Canopus in their orbit together around the galaxy.
A Vedic commentator explores how precession has been embedded in Indian observation of Canopus:
Quote:
1. Agastya, is the author of 25 hymns (nos 166 to 190) of the first ‘mandala’ of the Rigveda.
2. Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky, is called Agastya in India.
3. This star is close to the ecliptic south pole, having an ecliptic latitude of –76°.
4. As the celestial poles go round the ecliptic poles due to the phenomenon of precession of the earth’s axis of rotation, this star becomes visible from different latitudes on the globe at different times. If we assume that for a star to be visible at a place its altitude at the meridian passage should be at least 5°, then calculations give the visibility curve for Agastya (Canopus) as follows.
5. Agastya was not visible from any part of India before 10,000 BC.
6. First it became visible at Kanyakumari around that epoch. Thereafter, as it was brought more and more northwards by precession, it became visible at various places in India.
7. It became visible in the east coast (in the present Chennai region) in 8500 BC, and in the present day Hyderabad in 7200 BC, in the Vindhya region in 5200 BC, at Delhi in 3100 BC.
8. At present it is visible from most parts of India for longer or shorter durations. This cycle will repeat after every 25,765 years. It is thus clear that around 5000 BC, the star Agastya was visible from the south of the Vindhyas, but not from the north of it.
9. If sage Agastya was the first to cross the Vindhyas from the north, he would have been the first northerner to see the star. Hence the star has been named after him, just as the Magellanic clouds in the southern sky are named after the navigator Magellan, who first saw them as he sailed southwards.
10. This fixes an epoch of 5000 BC for sage Agastya. This date is based on the assumption that for a star to be visible its meridian altitude has to be at least 5°.
11. If we make 8° meridian altitude as the criterion for visibility, the date of Agastya would be shifted to about 4000 BC. The dates 5000 and 4000 BC should therefore bracket the probable epoch of Agastya crossing the Vindhyan mountains.
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Robert Tulip