Varuna

Varuna (/ˈvɜːrʊnə, ˈvɑːrə-/;Sanskrit: Varuṇa वरुण, Malay: Baruna) is the Hindu god of water and the celestial ocean, as well as a god of law of the underwater world. A Makara is his mount. His consort is the Hindu goddess Varuni. Originally the chief god of the Vedic pantheon, Varuna was replaced by Indra and later faded away with the ascendancy of Shiva and Vishnu.

In the Vedas

As chief of the Adityas, Varuna has aspects of a solar deity though, when opposed to Mitra, he is rather associated with the night, and Mitra with the daylight. As the most prominent Deva, however, he is mostly concerned with moral and societal affairs than being a deification of nature. Together with Mitra–originally 'agreement' (between tribes) personified—being master of ṛtá, he is the supreme keeper of order and god of the law.

Varuna and Mitra are the gods of the societal affairs including the oath, and are often twinned Mitra-Varuna (a dvandva compound). Varuna is also twinned with Indra in the Rigveda, as Indra-Varuna (when both cooperate at New Year in re-establishing order).

20000 Varuna

20000 Varuna is a large classical Kuiper belt object. It is probably a dwarf planet. It rotates rapidly and hence its shape is probably very elongated.

History

Discovery

Varuna was discovered on 28 November 2000 by Rovert McMillan of Spacewatch. It was given the provisional designation 2000 WR₁₀₆ and has been precovered in plates dating back to 1954.

Name

Varuna is named after a Hindu deity. Varuna was one of the most important deities of the ancient Indians, and he presided over the waters of the heaven and of the ocean and was the guardian of immortality. Due to his association with the waters and the ocean, he is often identified with Greek Poseidon and Roman Neptune. Varuna received the minor planet number 20000 because it was the largest cubewano found so far and was believed to be as large as Ceres.

Size

The size of the large Kuiper belt objects can be determined by simultaneous observations of thermal emission and reflected sunlight. Unfortunately, thermal measures, intrinsically weak for distant objects, are further hampered by the absorption of Earth's atmosphere, because only the weak 'tail' of the emissions is accessible to Earth-based observations. In addition, the estimates are model-dependent with the unknown parameters (e.g. pole orientation and thermal inertia) to be assumed. Consequently, the estimates of the albedo vary, resulting in sometimes substantial differences in the inferred size. Estimates for the diameter of Varuna have varied from 500 to 1,060 km. Multi-band thermal measurements from the Herschel Space Observatory in 2013 yielded a diameter of 7005668000000000000♠668+154
−86 km.

Varuna (book)

Varuna is a political literature book written and published in 1907 by German social Darwinist and racialist Willibald Hentschel. The book is named after the Hindu god Varuna. Hentschel declares the importance of racial purification of the Aryan race to history and calls for the unification of Germans in Eastern Europe into a German colony.

References

Mitra

*Mitra is the reconstructed Proto-Indo-Iranian name of an Indo-Iranian divinity from which the names and some characteristics of Rigvedic Mitrá and Avestan Mithra derive.

The names (and occasionally also some characteristics) of these two older figures were subsequently also adopted for other figures:

Mitra (crater)

Mitra is a lunar crater that is attached to the western outer rim of the larger crater Mach, on the far side of the Moon. Just to the west of Mitra is Bredikhin, and to the south-southeast lies Henyey. It is named after Sisir Kumar Mitra.

This is a heavily eroded formation with an outer rim that has been damaged by subsequent impacts. Attached to the exterior along the southeast is the satellite crater Mitra J. A number of smaller impacts lie along the rim edge, and very little of the original rim remains intact. Within the interior, a smaller crater occupies the southwestern part of the floor, and a small, cup-shaped crater lies across the northeast rim of this formation and very close to the midpoint of Mitra. The remaining floor is marked only by a few small and tiny craterlets.

Mitra lies within the Dirichlet-Jackson Basin.

Satellite craters

By convention these features are identified on lunar maps by placing the letter on the side of the crater midpoint that is closest to Mitra.

Mitra (Conan)

Mitra is a deity from the Hyborian Age ]. In the Conan the Barbarian series of stories by Howard, Mitra is a popular god among the Hyborian peoples, a personification of good.

He is probably loosely based on the Vedic and Zoroastrian figure by the same name, and in the Hyborian universe, his worship generally represents Christianity.

Mitra is the chief god of most of the civilized Hyborian kingdoms, including Aquilonia, Ophir, Nemedia, Brythunia, Corinthia, and Zingara. His worshippers are monolatristic, since at least one tale depicts priests of Mitra recognizing the existence of another deity (Set). He is depicted as a "gentle" god.

The Mitran cult does not practice sacrifice and values aesthetic simplicity. Thus his shrines are usually unadorned and feature little or no iconography except for a single idol. The idol itself has the appearance of an idealized male figure and is the primary direction of Mitran worship. However, being omnipresent and incorporeal, Mitra is not considered to reside in the icon, nor share its appearance. He is also symbolically represented by a phoenix in Howard's writing and by an Ankh in the Age of Conan MMORPG.

Mitra–Varuna

Mitra and Varuna are two deities (devas) frequently referred to in the ancient Indian scripture of the Rigveda. They are both considered Ādityas, or deities connected with the Sun; and they are protectors of the righteous order of rta. Their connection is so close that they are frequently linked in the dvandva compound Mitra–Varuna.

For further information, see the articles on the separate deities Mitra (Vedic) and Varuna.

References