Have you ever wondered what the night sky would look like around Vulcan, Tatooine, Alderan or Arakis?  Would it look like the Earth’s night sky?  Would you look up and see a dark sky with only a handful of very bright stars that stand out in a background of dim stars?  Would you be able to recognise patterns of constellations in the sky that the small number of bright stars appear to trace out? Would you look up and see discernible patterns such as a snake like Draco, or a line like Orion’s belt?  Also would the bright stars of the constellations themselves be concentrated in a belt like ring?  Is the Earth’s night sky just like the night sky of all of these imaginary planets or their real analogues?

 The answer to all of the above questions is a resounding NO.  Almost all the night skies of planets orbiting distant stars fall into one of three basic patterns.  Planets located in Galactic Nuclei (which constitute about 90% of stars) would see a very bright sky filled with millions of stars that all have just about the same brightness.  Planets located in high gas areas such as spiral arms would see only a small number of randomly distributed dull stars.  These constitute about about 8% of the remainder.  The last approximately 2% would see a sky similar to the Solar System’s but it would look more like a wall paper made up of a uniform field of mixed bright and dull stars with few if any creating a discernible pattern.

As it turns out the Solar System, we are fortunate enough to inhabit, has a very rare sky and occupies a very unusual almost spooky position in space.  Astronomers have discovered the Solar System sits in the middle of  a very low density star bubble.  This bubble is about 3000 light years across.  It contains about a million low mass stars but only a few thousand high mass stars.  Even stranger,  these high mass stars are primarily located in a band called Gould’s Belt.  Gould’s Belt is a ribbon of stars that make up the constellations of the night sky. This narrow band is tilted about 20 degrees to the plane of the Milky Way, our Galactic disk.  It is the combination of low star density with a band of ultra bright stars concentrated in a belt which runs through it that provides the beautiful night skies peppered with constellations that the Earth’s inhabitants are allowed to enjoy. 

These constellations have figured prominently in the history of the Earth.  They have been useful tool to navigate on sea and land.  They also have proven valuable to agriculturalists to mark out the farming labor cycles.  The constellations have also figured prominently in the imagination of people all over the planet who used  them as visual symbols of their mythology.

There is a second great mystery associated with the stars of Gould’s Belt.  These stars seem to have been formed separately from the rest of the stars in our Galaxy. Stars are normally formed in the gas rich spiral arms.  The stars in Gould’s Belt however seem to have been formed outside the spiral arms in “some local violent event.” This is truly a weird situation.  The Earth sits in the middle of a peculiar bubble that seems to have been swept clear of most of the stars that were originally formed in it.  The bubble was then surrounded by a unique ring of a few thousand bright stars that were formed in an unusual, possibly unique,  event separately from all the other 200 million stars in this galaxy. 

The title of this Blog was taken from the headline to the article which contained most of the information used in this Blog.  The article however attempts to explain this amazing situation through the invocation of Dark Matter.  At this time no one even knows if Dark Matter actually exists. Even if it is proven that Dark Matter exists and was the immediate cause of the wonderfully beautiful, glorious skies the Earth enjoys,  would it not seem likely that the ultimate cause behind this incredible series of coincidences was the Hand of God? 

Source: “Orion’s Dark Secret,” NewScientist, Nov. 21, 2009, pp 42-45.

The Bible mentions five colors in Hebrew: red (adom), Yellow (tzahov), green (yerakon), blue (tchelet) and magenta (argaman).  One curious observation is immediately apparent, in that this list not only includes the primary colors - red, yellow and blue but it also includes the only two other colors green and magenta that are necessary to produce the complete color palate for four color printing. As interesting as this observation is it pales in comparison to a discovery made by Haim Shore a professor of Statistics and Engineering at Ben-Gurion University. What Professor Shore discovered is that the numerical values of the Hebrew words for these colors is correlated with the spectral wave frequency for these colors. 

Hebrew is an alpha numeric language - in that every letter is also equal to a number.  So if you add the values of each letter you get a number for the total value of the word. This is commonly used in “gematria”, the Rabbinic Cabalistic system of Biblical interpretation and prophesy, but what Shore did is not gematria. After calculating a total value for each word, he then plotted them on a graph.  He plotted the numerical value of each word on the horizontal graph and the color’s wave frequency on the vertical axis .  To Shore’s amazement he discovered that the graph yielded a straight line.

“It’s a universal principle of engineering that if you have two sets of data, you put them in ascending order, plot one set on the horizontal axis and the other on a vertical axis and if they fall on a straight line, that means that both data sets are measuring the same thing, only on a different scale. “I was astonished.  The five points on the graph formed a straight line, which means that the names of the colors related directly to their wave frequencies.” It was purely a statistical analysis Shore said,”I didn’t manipulate a single number in doing the analysis.” “When I saw this result I was stunned.” “I was completely astonished. Then I went on to other words in the Hebrew Bible, plotting the value of the letters against known scientific data. The whole thing blew me away.” Shore went on to investigate similar cases in the Bible and so far has preformed over 20 different analyses with statistically verifiable findings, for example he has found a similar correlation between numerical word value a planetary diameters.

Shore began as a Bible skeptic and did not expect to make any of these findings.  He says that he does not want to tell anyone what his findings mean but their theological implications are unavoidable.

Sources:

“Mere Coincidence or divine truth?”, by Yocheved Russo, Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2009.

“Coincidence in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew”, by Haim Shore, 2008, iUniverse, New York.