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ARCHAEOASTRONOMY

Maya meteor mystery

Nature Astronomy volume 1, page 561 (2017)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 02 November 2017

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Planet. Space Sci. 144, 112–125 (2017)

Maya records note precise astronomical observations of eclipses, Venus and the other planets. Their astronomer-priests were so advanced that they could calculate the length of the sidereal year to three decimal places — much more accurately than the Spanish at the time, who would lay waste to the Maya civilization and destroy most of the codices (screen-fold books) containing their astronomic records. Within the remaining codices, there are no explicit dates of meteor showers. Are the records simply too incomplete, or is there a systematic way of finding embedded information in the hieroglyphs? With this question in mind, J. Hutch Kinsman and David Asher use high-speed computers to model meteor outbursts and correlate them with significant Maya dates.

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  • 02 November 2017

    In the version of this Research Highlight originally published, the figure credit was incorrect. The figure has now been correctly attributed to ‘Sébastian Lecocq / Alamy Stock Photo’ in all versions of the Research Highlight.

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  1. Nature Astronomy https://www.nature.com/natureastronomy/

    May Chiao

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  1. May Chiao
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Correspondence to May Chiao.

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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0303-1.

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Chiao, M. Maya meteor mystery. Nat Astron 1, 561 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0234-x

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