Sky and Telescope - April 2018 - 38

Maya Meteors

just a couple of thousand date entries across the entire seven
centuries of the Classic period. Events recorded on these dates
mark not just the accession of kings, but also the births and
deaths of important people and conquests of one city-state
over another. We can also ﬁnd astronomical information
relating to Venus, and both solar and lunar eclipses, in these
records. However, scholars have found no evidence of any
meteor showers among the historical remnants.
Asher, a solar system modeler with an interest in the history of astronomical observations, considers this lacuna a bit
strange, as records of meteor showers have been recovered
from ancient Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and various European civilizations. In addition, based on their records of lunar

Cancún

Uxmal
Tulum

Sayil

Yucatán
Peninsula

f
ul

Belize
City

BELIZE

Yaxchilan

Caracol

Car

Tikal

Altun
Ha

ibb

Calakmul

ean

Sea

M EXICO

GUATEM AL A
Utatlan

Quiriguá
Copan

HO N DU RA S

Guatemala
City

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San
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Salvador
SALVADOR
N I C A RA G U A

Maya archaeological sites
Present-day cities

A PR I L 2 018 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

t EXPANSIVE CULTURE The Maya civilization
spread across a large piece of Mesoamerica, including the Yucatán Peninsula and the mountains of the
Sierra Madre region (present-day Mexico, Guatemala,
and Belize). The city-states of the Maya Classic period
(c. AD 250-900), which boasted populations as large
as 120,000, produced most of the stone monuments
and historical records that we have today.

M A P: LE A H TISCIONE / S&T

ico

Chichen
Itza

and planetary movements, the Maya certainly had the capability to predict such celestial phenomena. "Did the records
just disappear with much of the Maya book records," Asher
wondered, "or are there still clues we are missing?"
Asher has experience with meteor showers, having used
the spectacular 1966 Leonid outburst, the biggest and most
impressive of the 20th century, to predict the arrival time
of subsequent displays in 1999, 2001, and 2002. Together
with Robert H. McNaught, he achieved this with a computer
program developed to model the trails of material shed by
a comet and calculate when Earth's travels around the Sun
would cross them in the future. When they input the data for
Comet Tempel-Tuttle, the parent comet for the Leonids, the
shower predictions were accurate to a few minutes.
Asher's interest in the Maya and their historical records
came about only relatively recently following a chance
encounter with Kinsman, a man who spends his time looking
to the past rather than upwards. (Kinsman originally studied
physics but has focused on the Maya for the last 20 years.)
At their ﬁrst meeting, Kinsman brought up the mysterious
absence of shooting star records in the Western Hemisphere.
("It was a fascinating lecture," recalls Asher.) By 2015 the
two scholars had begun working together to address the missing Maya meteors.
Asher's experience with the Leonids proved that with
sufﬁcient knowledge of a comet's past location one could
predict when the Earth would pass through its remnant
trails later on. And if they knew the exact dates of meteor
outbursts visible to the ancient Maya, perhaps they could
spot indirect evidence of their impact in the recovered Maya
events calendar. In terms of which comet to choose, the close
proximity of Halley to Earth's orbit during the Maya midClassic period made a strong argument for looking for
evidence related to its Eta Aquariid showers, which

Sky and Telescope - April 2018

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