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