The lunatic is on the grass

As fans of Pink Floyd know, finding something strange where it shouldn’t be happens in an equally strange place.

I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon

Good news for Roger Waters and the band – China’s lunar rover Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit No. 2) lived up to their famous “Brain Damage” lyrics when it woke up after a lunar-night-long nap on the dark side (a.k.a. the far side) of the Moon and discovered a strange gel-like substance never seen before by any lunar rovers, satellites or landers. Did the Jade Rabbit find some lunar jade?

“With the help of obstacle-avoidance cameras, Yutu-2 carefully approached the crater and then targeted the unusually colored material and its surroundings. The rover examined both areas with its Visible and Near-Infrared Spectrometer (VNIS), which detects light that is scattered or reflected off materials to reveal their makeup.”

Some things just stand out

Kudos to Space.com for keeping a close eye on the Yutu-2 ‘drive diary’ published by the government-sanctioned Chinese-language publication Our Space (you can see it here along with many photos of Chinese rocket scientists at work) and clep.ro, the website of China’s Lunar and Space exploration group. A full lunar day lasts 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes, and the Yutu-2 rover shuts down in the middle of the 14-day period of sunlight to protect it against the intense direct solar radiation. Yutu-2 awoke from its latest “nap” on July 25th and traveled a few hundred feet around craters and obstacles. According to the diary, just as Yutu-2 was getting ready to shut down on July 28th, Yutu Mission Control spotted something “gel-like” with an “unusual color” not seen before on the generally drab lunar surface.

As David Letterman liked to ask … is this anything?

And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear

Dark side of the moon resident?

Yutu-2 is shouting in its best Roger Waters style, but no one can hear you in space. Or at least that’s as much as the Chinese government space program wants you to believe. Space.com says that they have said nothing, but “one possible explanation, outside researchers suggested, is that the substance is melt glass created from meteorites striking the surface of the moon.”

Melted glass? Or Or did the Jade Rabbit find some lunar jade?

History is far from completely chronicled. For as much as we know there is much that still remains in the shadows, and popping up from time to time to remind us of this fact are the various anomalous objects that we dig up that jolt out preconceptions and show us that ancient peoples were much more complex and stranger than we had ever thought before. One of these objects was found in the country of Germany in the 1990s, and it has proven to be a conundrum that defies our knowledge of the people of the time, and has gone on to become an intriguing historical anomaly that remains unsolved.

The artifact could have very well remained hidden away from the eyes of humankind forever if it hadn’t been for some illegal treasure hunters snooping around. In 1999, Henry Westphal and Mario Renner were hunting for treasure with metal detectors in Ziegelroda Forest, of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, near a town called Nebra, when they stumbled across two bronze swords, two hatchets, a chisel, some fragments of what appeared to be bracelets, jewelry, and most interesting of all, an anomalous bronze, disc-like object measuring 30 cm across, weighing about 5 pounds, and covered with strange inscriptions and cryptic diagrams and writing, some of which was inlaid with gold leaf, as well as gold circles, crescents, and bands upon it, the significance of it all unknown.

Now, none of this was legal at all. Not only were Westphal and Renner operating without a license, but they were using metal detectors, which was not allowed, and also any treasure found in the area is automatically the property of of the state of Saxony-Anhaltof, but they had no intention of handing their hoard over. The two illegal treasure hunters had no idea what the disc was, only that it was old, had gold in it, and was therefore potentially valuable. The very next day after making their find, the two sold the whole lot on the black market, and the mysterious disk would sort of disappear into the world of illegal treasure trading for the next few years. The disk and its mysteries might have disappeared forever, just as elusive as it had been when buried under the earth, if it wasn’t for a black market police sting operation carried out in February of 2002, during which it was confiscated and found its way into the hands of the German archeologist Harald Meller. Only then would it become clear just how bizarre the discovery actually was.

The two original treasure hunters were tracked down and arrested, and under a plea deal they agreed to disclose where they had found the disc. It turned out to be some sort of ancient burial mound thought to date back to the 2nd millennium BC, within which were found various other bronze artifacts and which was found to be situated on the hill in just such a way as for the sun to set behind a high peak called the Brocken during every solstice. However, even more exciting than the site where it was found was the disk itself, which had golden arcs that aligned with these solstices, and this was only the beginning of its mysteries. The symbols inscribed upon it were found to be depictions of the sun, moon, and a constellation of stars thought to be Pleiades Constellation, and when aligned correctly it was found that the disk could be used to calibrate the solstices and provide accurate representations of the night sky over the course of the year. Using two arcs on the edges of the disk, it was found that they span an angle of 82°, which accurately indicates the angle between the positions of sunset at summer and winter solstice at the latitude of the Mittelberg.

The disk was also able to correctly calculate moon phases and the location of stars in the sky, and all in all it was an amazingly accurate tool for its apparent age, perhaps the oldest known depiction of the universe. Of course,  considering its accuracy, age, and the fact that its artistic style was not consistent with what was known from the era it supposedly belongs to, it was thought that what has come to be known as the Nebra Sky Disk was nothing more than a hoax or forgery, and prehistory professor at the University of Bristol, Richard Harrison, would say of it:

When I first heard about the Nebra Disc I thought it was a joke, indeed I thought it was a forgery. Because it’s such an extraordinary piece that it wouldn’t surprise any of us that a clever forger had cooked this up in a backroom and sold it for a lot of money.

The Nebra Sky Disk

However, analysis showed that it indeed seemed to be authentic, dating back to at least 1600 BC, quite likely much older, and likely a creation of the Bronze Age Unetice culture, and it was also found that it had been modified and tweaked over the centuries, adding new holes, crescents, arcs, and bands, perhaps as the creators attempted to calibrate it more precisely. If the calculated age is correct, then this would make it the oldest known and most accurate portable astronomical tool in the world for its era, and demonstrates that the people who made it had a shockingly sophisticated understanding of the cosmos and cycles of the night sky.

One of the biggest mysteries of the Sky Disk is not only how these ancient people knew so much about the night sky, but also what exactly it was used for. Ideas include that it was an item of religious significance, that is was used to anticipate seasonal phases for planning harvests and other agricultural purposes, or that it was used for shamanic rituals, but no one really knows for sure, and there is absolutely no written record of the disk having been made or where it came from. We are still not sure how these ancient people had this knowledge all the way back in the Bronze Age or even exactly who mad it in the first place, and the Nebra Sky Disk has gone on to be a much discussed historical anomaly. How did they have all of this information in a violent era when most of the artifacts found are weapons? Was it aliens? It was aliens, wasn’t it?

Whatever the answers may be, it is often considered as being one of the most important archeological finds of the century, and in 2013 was in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Nowadays the Nebra Sky Disk has remained on permanent exhibition at the Halle State Museum of Prehistory (Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte), in Halle, Germany, and it is considered a priceless artifact of German archeology. For now the Nebra Sky Disk keeps its mysteries close, but it provides a rare glimpse into ancient peoples and their understanding of the cosmos, which has proven to be much more complex than ever thought before.

Have you ever sat in bad rush hour traffic (isn’t that redundant?) and said to yourself, “I could get out of this if I had a wormhole”? Me neither, but apparently some astrophysicists have and they’ve developed and published a set of step-by-step do-it-yourself instructions for building one – along with the prerequisite admonishments that these are for informational purposes only and you shouldn’t try this at home. HA! Let’s get started with our wormhole.

“We construct traversable wormholes by starting with simple four-dimensional classical solutions respecting the null energy condition and containing a pair of oppositely charged black holes connected by a non-traversable wormhole. We then consider the perturbative back-reaction of bulk quantum fields in Hartle-Hawking states. Our geometries have zero cosmological constant and are asymptotically flat except for a cosmic string stretching to infinity that is used to hold the black holes apart. Another cosmic string wraps the non-contractible cycle through the wormhole, and its quantum fluctuations provide the negative energy needed for traversability.”

OK, so all we need are a couple of oppositely charged black holes and two cosmic strings. For where to order those online, you might want to check with Zicao Fu, Brianna Grado-White, and Donald Marolf, authors of “Traversable Asymptotically Flat Wormholes with Short Transit Times,” a preprint paper published recently in arXiv.org. Fu is a PhD candidate, Grado-White a graduate student and Marolf a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their paper does indeed give step-by-step instructions, including the supporting documents and mathematical formulas, for building a wormhole that doesn’t have the instability problem most wormholes have.

“But this wormhole-via-charged-black-holes has two issues. One, it’s still unstable, and if something or someone actually tries to use it, it falls apart. The other is that the two oppositely charged black holes will be attracted to each other — both through gravitational and electric forces — and if they fall together you just get a single, big, neutrally charged and altogether useless black hole.”

Fortunately for those of us who are not astrophysicists, astrophysicist, Paul Sutter at The (trademark pending) Ohio State University has a simple explanation in Live Science. His good news is that charged black holes are real. His bad news is that using a pair with opposite charges means they want to come together right now over me. (John Lennon would have LOVED the idea of wormholes.) The good news is, a cosmic string – extremely thin 1-dimensional topological defects which may have formed during the early days of the universe – could be used to keep them separated … not perfectly, but better than the referee between contestants in a professional wrestling match. The paper suggests getting two cosmic strings and forming a closed loop between the black holes. The loop would then vibrate and churn the space around them until the energy goes negative, creating a negative mass that would stabilize the wormhole, allowing matter (cars?) or even just messages (Anybody home? Marco!) to pass through.

The bad news is (you knew there was more), cosmic strings are hypothetical. However, Sutter gives one more tantalizing bit of good news:

“Still, there’s no reason they can’t exist, so they’re fair game.”

Fair game? Game on! Stop wasting your time honking your horn in that traffic jam and start figuring out a way to get some black holes and a couple of cosmic strings.

Throughout history there have been those great figures whose names everyone seems to know, regardless of whether they actually know anything about them. These are the big hitters of history, seemingly larger than life, almost transcending the bounds of physical entities to become legends. Yet for as well known as they are and for as much as historians might know about their deaths, some of these legendary figures have managed to pose great mysteries in their passing, leading mighty lives only to vanish without a trace after death, only their memories remaining.

Going back into the mists of time we have the great Egyptian ruler Cleopatra, the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, and her Roman General lover Mark Anthony. When Antony and Cleopatra were defeated in a massive naval battle against Octavian’s forces the during at the 31 BC Battle of Actium, Octavian moved to invade Egypt in 30 BC. Antony’s forces were crushed, and in defeat he committed suicide, likely by stabbing himself, although no one is quite certain. When Cleopatra learned of this death and was faced with being brought in before to a Roman triumphal in celebration of the loathed Octavian’s victory, she too killed herself in a fit of depression and defiance.

Mysteries have long swirled ever since around Cleopatra’s death, and despite the fact that she is one of the most recognizable, iconic, and well-known rulers in history, even all the way up into modern times, there is much we still don’t know about her last days and moments. One persistent mystery is how she died in the first place. The most common theory is that she killed herself by enticing an asp or other venomous snake to bite her arm, but there are all sorts of other ideas, including that she used a poison loaded hairpin she is said to have carried at all times, that she applied some sort of poisonous ointment to her skin, or that she simply overdosed on opium. No one really knows. We also don’t know where her final resting place is, as it was never recorded, although it was written that she was buried together with Mark Antony.

It has been theorized that Cleopatra would have had a tomb prepared for herself in some form, probably near Alexandria, but where it could be is anyone’s guess. There have been many digs trying to find the lost tomb of Cleopatra, and in 2009 archeologists investigated a promising site at the Taposiris Magna temple in Abusir, Egypt. Here there were found mummies, busts featuring her visage, a mask believed to have belonged to Mark Anthony, and coins with their likenesses, all of which seemed to suggest that Cleopatra and Antony were not far away, but the dig was ultimately unsuccessful. In more recent years it has been suggested that her tomb in fact might now lie under the sea, and in the end the lost tomb of Cleopatra is one of the holy grails of archeology.

Just as famous as Cleopatra was the iconic Alexander III of Macedon, more popularly known as Alexander the Great, who ruled from 356 BC to 323 BC and is well-known for his reign of stunning conquests spanning an empire from Greece to India and covering large swaths of Asia and northeast Africa. His inexorable, unstoppable path of victory came to an end in 323 BC, when he was killed in Babylon. His body was then supposedly placed within an opulent sarcophagus fashioned of solid gold and filled with honey, all of which was then placed within a golden casket and put on display in a tomb in Alexandria, where the sarcophagus was visited by such notable historical figures as Julius Caesar, Augustus, Cleopatra, Octavian, Caligula, Hadrian, Severus, Caracalla, and many others. The tomb was finally sealed after it was plundered for gold and Alexander’s breast plate was stolen, and it remained that way until Christianity came to the region in the 4th century and paganism was outlawed. After this, Alexander the Great’s tomb and casket just sort of vanished off the face of the earth. To this day no one has any idea where Alexander the Great’s tomb and sarcophagus are, with it being theorized to rest at a variety of places including Alexandria, Greece, or even all the way over in Venice, but despite countless expeditions it remains one of the great historical mysteries.

Speaking of empire building warlords, here we have the founder and first emperor of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan. During his reign and ruthless expansion across vast areas he would conquer regions sprawled out from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific and encompassing large portions of Eurasia and most of Central Asia and China. It would become one of the largest empires the world has ever known, all fashioned through a brutal and bloody campaign, and all darkly shadowed by a cloud of violent genocide and punctuated by the merciless massacres of countless innocent people. Genghis Khan is one of the most notorious, vicious, and feared tyrants in history, and upon his death on August 18, 1227 during a military campaign in China it is probably safe to say that there was no love lost among the cowering populace of the lands he had held in an iron, ravenous grip. However, for as much as we know about his specacular life, his death and final resting place remain complete mysteries.

Genghis Khan

One mystery is his exact cause of death, which has been variously theorized to have been dying in action, falling from a horse, or succumbing to some illness or infection of a wound, or even being murdered by his own men, but no one really knows. What we do know is that Genghis Khan had stipulated to his men that upon his death he was to be buried in an unmarked grave and its location kept a total secret. To this end, his closest men really went overboard. It is said that the location where he was buried was intentionally trampled over by nearly a thousand horsemen in order to mask its location, after which every single one of the horsemen was killed. Even as the body was being moved to its final resting place it is believed that his personal funeral escort had everyone who witnessed their movements executed, as well as the ones who dug the grave, to keep it all secret, with the final result being that no one has a clue as to where one of the most fearsome warlords in history is buried.

Of course with such a veil of secrecy there are other legends surrounding the grave of Genghis Khan as well, such as the legend that a whole river was diverted over the burial site to hide it. Although there is a mausoleum with some of Genghis Khan’s possessions located in the town of Ejin Horo Banner, Inner Mongolia, this is not his actual resting place, and archeologists have scoured the world trying to locate it, utilizing ground penetrating radar, satellite imagery, and all manner of cutting edge technology, but it has evaded all attempts to find it and remains lost to history.

Quite similar is the lost grave of another great ruler, Attila the Hun, who ruled the Huns from 434 to 453, and was the head of a great empire of tribes that stretched across large swaths of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern Europe. He was known as a fearsome conqueror and plunderer who sought to spread out across Europe and Persia seeking to invade and dominate new lands, constantly battling the Romans and establishing himself as one of the Roman Empire’s greatest foes. In 453 Attila the Hun would according to records die a rather unusual death when he purportedly choked on a nosebleed at his own wedding feast, an odd end to such a ferocious and feared conqueror. Upon his death, it is said that Attila the Hun was buried within a coffin lavishly covered with gold and silver and filled with gems and other treasure, and that just as with Genghis Khan a river was diverted to hide the grave, and everyone who dug it was mercilessly killed to preserve its secret. Attila the Hun’s grave has never been found, and both he and even the Hunnic people themselves largely remain mysteries.

Attila the Hun

In later eras we have other tyrants and rulers who are known for their mysterious graves. Between 1448 to 1476, the area of modern day Romania known as Wallachia was ruled by Vlad III Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler, and perhaps even more known as the inspiration behind Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as for his infamous cruelty and his gruesome habit of impaling enemies on spikes. Vlad the Impaler was killed in battle against Ottoman forces and his body supposedly decapitated and chopped into pieces, but where his final grave is has remained a mystery. It was long thought that he was interred in the Monastery of Snagov outside of Bucharest, with an unmarked tombstone long thought to be his. However, in the 1930s this grave was dug up only to find the bones and jaws of horses. Since then there have been many proposed sites for Vlad the Impaler’s final resting place, but so far it has not been found, and the grave of the real life Dracula remains steeped in mystery.

It is not only rulers and warlords who are well known for their elusive final resting places, and some of the more famous mysterious lost graves belong to well-known artists. Perhaps the most famous of all of these is that of the great artist, inventor, overall polymath and master of the Renaissance, Leonardo Da Vinci. After dying in 1519 at the age of 67, which was quite old for the era, Da Vinci was supposedly interred beneath a church that was destroyed during the French Revolution in 1789. When workers rebuilding the site went through the rubble, they are said to have found some human remains and a part of a demolished headstone that were believed to have belonged to Da Vinci, and that these were brought to another chapel. Although his official resting place is France’s Chateau d’Amboise, it is still unknown if these remains and the piece of headstone kept there are really his at all, and even the description displayed at the grave explains it as merely the “presumed remains” of Da Vinci.

Leonardo Da Vinci

There is also the story of the grave of one of history’s great composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who died in 1791 at the age of 35 from an unidentified illness. Considering how incredibly famous Mozart has become over the centuries, one would think that his grave would be known as well, but this does not seem to be the case. One of the problems is that in life he was not nearly as well-known as he would go on to be, after his death, and so his burial was not all that big of an event. In fact, it seems what has gone on to be considered one of the greatest composers of all time was rather unceremoniously put in a cheap wooden coffin and buried in a cemetery in a common, unmarked grave, possibly even buried in a sort of mass grave with others. Making things even more difficult is that in that era it was common to remove all of the graves to make way for new ones every 10 years, so Mozart’s remains could have gone anywhere, possibly even crushed or cremated and otherwise destroyed. In 1801, a gravedigger came forward to claim that he had in his possession the skull of Mozart, but DNA tests in later years have cast doubt on this. Where are Mozart’s remains? Ideas range from that they have vanished forever to that fans of the composer had them moved to a safe location, but in the end no one really knows.

Here we have looked at only a few of the lost graves and tombs of some of history’s most important people. Where did they go? How could such prominent, larger than life figures in life figures just disa ppear in death? Some of these lost graves have gone on to become some of the most highly sought after treasures in archeology, yet they remain hidden and evasive, keeping their secrets close. One day we may find the answers we seek, but for now these spectacular historical figures remain enigmas in death, seemingly eveporating into the mists of time.