Tangleworm

The genocide of Gaza is still ongoing.

This elaborate saddle blanket dates back to about 400-300 BCE. It was discovered in the Pazyryk barrows, located in the Altai mountains of Siberia, where it had been preserved in the permafrost for more than 2,000 years. It's made of felt, leather, horsehair, and gold foil.

Above: the appliqués at the center of the saddle blanket

The central design features two identical appliqués, each depicting an ibex being pinned down by a griffin.

Above: close-up of the appliqués

The sides of the saddle cover are also decorated with circular pendants made of felt; each of these pendants is trimmed with leather, encircled by tufts of horsehair, and embroidered with a stylized depiction of a ram's-head. A pair of horned tigers can also be seen at the base of each pendant.

Above: the pendants that hang from each side of the saddle cover

This artifact is attributed to the Altaic nomads of Siberia, who formed part of the larger group of cultures that are collectively known as the Scythians (or Scytho-Siberian peoples).

According to the Hermitage Museum:

Saddles used by the ancient Altaic nomads differ from those used today. They had no wooden base and consisted of two leather cushions filled with reindeer and horse hair and sewn together on one side. Felt saddle covers were traditionally decorated with scenes showing a beast of prey tearing to pieces a herbivorous animal. 

The Scythians were among the first cultures to begin using horses as mounts, and they invented one of the earliest forms of saddle. They were extremely skilled and accomplished riders, and their early mastery of mounted warfare enabled them to gain control over vast sections of Eurasia. That dynamic led to the development of a very noticeable "horse culture," with horses playing a critical role in many different aspects of Scythian life (and afterlife):

The horse was an essential part of Scythian life and was the most important and multipurpose animal used by the nomads. Initially, the Scythians reared large herds of horses mainly for their milk and hides, but eventually were among the first people to harness the horse as a mount.

By the 7th century BCE, the Scythians were already master horsemen and controlled a vast corridor of land that stretched across southern Siberia, from the Black Sea to the fringes of northern China. This expanse of land was greater than the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which the Scythians outlasted.

The Scythians produced many horse-related artifacts that have been discovered at sites throughout Eurasia, but this saddle cover is one of the most elaborate and most well-preserved examples of that tradition.

Above: the saddle cover from Pazyryk

Two other artifacts from Pazyryk have previously been featured on my blog -- a 2,300-year-old plush bird and an elaborate horse headdress.

Sources & More Info:

Hermitage Museum: Saddle Cover

World Archaeology: Do the Clothes Make the Horse? Roles, Statuses, and Identities in the Pazyryk World

University of Washington: Artifacts from Southern Siberia/Pazyryk

Expedition: The Textiles from Pazyryk (PDF)

Cambridge University Press: The Origins of Saddles and Riding Technology in East Asia

Routledge: Pazyryk Culture Up in the Altai

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Please spread this around. Don't let ANYONE lie and say my community is anything but ASTONISHINGLY UNITED in rejection of ICE's behavior. This crosses generations, race lines, party lines, class lines. THAT is how bad ICE is. THAT is how bad we want them gone.

THAT is how loudly we are DEMANDING they leave!

Do you understand what a crowd like this means in a small city like Minneapolis??? In weather that hurts to breathe???

Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, is 0.008% the mass of Jupiter. The Moon is a bit over 1.2% of Earth's mass and a solid 27% of its radius. There's no other planet* in the solar system with a satellite anywhere close to the kind of similarity in size that the Earth-Moon system has.

You might also say "Fine but it's literally called 'The Moon' so that's a bit silly". To which I say that I've been calling it that to be more easily understood but it would be extremely easy to switch to calling it "Luna" which is what most people do when they encounter situations where saying "The Moon" creates ambiguity - like when writing sci-fi or a nontrivial amount of astronomical research.

In conclusion, lumping Luna in with the satellites of other bodies is unhelpful because it is geophysically distinct from most of them, and orbitally distinct from all of them. Luna is a planet and it's rad that we can see one so clearly in the night sky.

Hi, I'm an astrophysicist, I am well aware of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) definition of a planet. It is a definition that is relatively controversial and doesn't really make a lot of sense - it was mostly written to prevent the list of planets from getting too long as we discovered more dwarfs. This definition does not include anything to do with barycentres - I'll get back to that.

The IAU definition of a planet has 3 parts:

1. Object in orbit around our Sun

2. Object has reached hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. it's a sphere, not a potato)

3. Object has cleared its neighborhood around its orbit

Both Earth and Luna satisfy 2. I will accept that 1 is debatable, but the crux of my argument is that Luna is the size of a terrestrial planet (yes, ~1% of Earth's mass, but still huge and of roughly the same order of magnitude as Mercury, which is a mere ~5% of Earth's mass) and exceptionally large relative to its orbital partner compared to any other "satellite", a factor the IAU does not account for.

It's important to note that 1 literally does not permit binary planets - even if both bodies are identical, one must be the "moon". This is major criticism of the IAU definition. It also doesn't account for exoplanets or rogue planets, but that's another story.

3 is where this definition falls apart. You could easily argue that most of the planets in our solar system fail depending on how you interpret it, because it's so fuzzy. The Earth fails, because there's a planet-sized body chilling out in its orbit (Luna), Jupiter fails because it has huge quantities of asteroids trapped in its Lagrange points, etc.

In the latter case, we say that because Jupiter is determining the motion of these bodies, it still counts. For the Earth we simply ignore Luna and say that the rule is more about stray bodies than orbital partners. But by the same logic we can say that for Luna we ignore the Earth, and Luna passes.

So I would argue that the IAU definition is bad, but if you fixed it so that it allowed binary systems to exist, it would readily define Luna as a planet in my view (if you deleted the Earth from the solar system and left Luna, it would unambiguously meet the criteria).

Now let's talk about barycentres.

The barycentre of two bodies in orbit is just their overall centre of mass. People often point to the external barycentre of the Pluto-Charon system to indicate that they are binary dwarfs. However, this is a poor metric in my view, because it's highly dependent on orbital distance.

The centre of mass of the Earth-Luna system is inside the Earth at present, but if Luna simply orbited further away, the barycentre would be in the empty space between them, with nothing about the two bodies individually, or the qualitative nature of their orbits, having changed. In fact, given enough time and pretending the Sun won't consume both bodies in a few billion years, Luna would actually drift far enough away due to tidal interactions for this to happen - it would be silly for it to suddenly be a planet one day when it wasn't the day before.

It's really frustrating to me when people lash out and say "You're wrong because there's a definition, for the love of god look up the definition" about a topic where I think it's clear my point is that I KNOW the definition and I disagree with it. And that's allowed! Definitions are made up! "Planets" are made up, and I think we should make them up differently!

All the things in our solar system are just different kinds of rocks dancing to each other's gravity- they're all affected by each one's gravity, even in tiny ways. They do not fall neatly into subcategories "planet" and "not a planet" - we made this distinction up because we wanted it. We noticed that some of the bodies in our solar system seemed much more important and dominant than others and we wanted a name for that. But the planets don't know that- they don't have an inherent major distinction between them, nor are they obligated to. When we wanted to come up with a way to clearly decide which bodies were planets, we had to make something up.

What we made up is a little bit vague, and even if it were extremely clear cut, we could still debate whether it was a reasonable or intuitive or useful definition.

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