Eddie Wrenn: The Ancient Egyptians Understood the Demon Star

Startling evidence suggests the ancient Egyptians understood the inner mechanics of a binary star system, spinning through our skies 93 light years away, more than 3,200 years ago. Not only that, their specific calculations have helped support a scientific line of inquiry, which only emerged just a few years ago. The binary system, two stars which rotate around each other, was first noted in modern astronomy by a John Goodricke, back in 1783. He spotted how Algol, also known as the Demon Star, appeared to decrease in brightness for a few hours every 2.87 days, and was the first to theorize that this was two stars blocking each other's light in relation to Earth. Or we thought he was the first, it turns out the Egyptians apparently had all this figured out 3,000 years earlier. The Egyptians were huge star-gazers, taking copious and accurate notes about changes in the heavens, and using these to form predictions about lucky and unlucky parts of the day. When Finnish researchers studied the Cairo Calendar, a badly-damaged but readable calendar highlighting the good and bad days of the year in 1200BC, they came to some startling observations. For the Egyptians not only made observations, they made conclusions and calculations to figure out the inner mechanisms of the stars for their charts. Two cycles were spotted in the Cairo Calendar. One lasted 29.6 days, almost exactly that of the lunar cycle. And the other was 2.85 days, which researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland ascribe to the Algol system.