The brightest star in the sky, and an African mystery

It is easy to locate the star Sirius in our night skies. This time of year it is found in the high in the south, just to the left of Orion the hunter (whom we talked about in December.) Even if you aren’t sure which way south is, just go out around 8 or 9PM and turn around until you see a very bright star. If you also see Orion, you have found Sirius.

The stars of Orion are bright because they are huge, hundreds of times larger than the Sun, so they appear brilliant even though they are 600 to over a thousand light years away. Sirius is bright because it is so close, only 8.6 light years. Sirius is only a little over twice the size of the Sun, and if it were a few dozen light years away, it would fade in with the other dimmer stars.

The mystery comes in when we look at the importance of Sirius, and the Dogon tribe of Africa. The Dogon (pronounced doe-gon) people live in Mali, in the cliff country around the bend of the Niger River. These people are farmers who try to raise enough grain to keep them for the year. The soil is poor and problems from insects and drought are common. But the Dogon tough it out. They are resourceful and persistent.

Anthropologists first learned of the connection between Sirius and the Dogon in 1931. The Dogon claim that Sirius, or rather an invisible companion star around Sirius, is one of most important things in the sky.

According to the Dogon, Sirius is called sigi tolo, and it has a tiny unseen companion called po tolo, or "deep beginning." This star po tolo is associated with the fonio grain, which is native to Africa, and the Dogon call po. This po grain is the smallest grain the Dogon know of, and was the first of the eight different seeds made by the creator, Amma.

The Dogon say the po grain is just like the star po tolo, tiny, white and very heavy. According to the Dogon creation myth, all things emerged from this star, just as all the other grain emerged from the first po seed grain.

The Dogon say that the star Po is the heaviest of stars, and used to be where our Sun is now. Then Po and the other stars all moved away from the Sun. But even though Po tolo has moved, it is still important. It is the "center of the sky." Po tolo’s influence keeps the other stars in place. The dogon say that Po tolo circles around Sirius once every fifty years.

This story might sound like a typical myth, that colors all cultures, but there is a mystery here. Sirius actually does have a companion star! Astronomers refer to the companion as Sirius B. It is a very small, very dense white dwarf star. And, it orbits Sirius in fifty years! Modern astronomy discovered Sirius B in 1844 by the wobbly motion of Sirius. But Sirius B was not seen through a telescope until 1862 with an eighteen and a half inch telescope. This telescope was the largest in the world at the time, and that is what it took to actually see the star!

The Dogon perform an elaborate ceremony every sixty years that they say is associated with the fifty year cycle of Sirius A and B. One has to wonder why the ceremony is ten years longer than the star’s cycle, but the Dogon say that this sixty year cycle is `related to’ the actual 50 year period. Records of the ceremonial masks they used show the ceremonies being held all the way back to the thirteenth century. But if it took such a large telescope to see the companion star, how did the Dogon know about Sirius B?

Fanciful thoughts of ancient astronauts may come to mind, but the solution seems to be more of an earthly nature. One explanation that has some possibility is that of cultural contamination. This happens when outside stories and information are brought into a culture by other cultures. If the stories or news fancy that culture, they often weave it into their own stories. But this explanation doesn’t fit very well when you consider how far back the traditions of the Dogon go.

It is also important to take note of the parts of the story that do not fit with what we know. (We tend to look for the puzzle pieces that fit, not the ones that don’t.) For example, the Dogon say that there is a third star in the system called emme ya tolo, that is larger and four times brighter than Sirius B. No such star has ever been found.

The mystery still awaits a final solution. It is certainly a complex, and perplexing mystery. And whatever the solution, the Dogon are certainly clever people. They certainly have the science community wondering!