The Nebra Disk is one of the earliest astronomical manifestations of humanity in Central Europe. We interpret the striking sevenfold stellar group shown on the disk as a celestial conjunction of the five naked‐eye visible planets together with Pollux and Castor in the constellation Gemini (happening in 2210BC) and the dominating large, filled circle as a bright supernova, probably corresponding to the remnant 3C58 in Cassiopeia. We believe that a close coincidence of these two extremely rare celestial events, that does never happen more than once in a human lifetime, could have impressed people of that epoch in a way that it was conveyed orally over several generations, until some Bronze Age artist created the Nebra Disk. If this interpretation is correct, it could offer a rather exact dating of a supernova explosion observed about 4200 years ago, more precise than any other dating methods for past supernova events, possibly leading to significant new insights into the underlying physics of supernovae.
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Vogt et al. (2024) studied this question.
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