The Vikings were notorious across Europe during the Iron Age , from the former 8th one C CE to 1066 CE . Along with their repute as fearsome warriors and unforgiving raiders , they were also great explorer of the sea – thought to have reached Iceland , Greenland , and even asfar as North Americaand the Middle East .
A few decades ago , it was indecipherable how they navigate these hazy and unknown sea , until researchers found some mysterious sunstone in a ship wreckage . Now , Hungarian researcher have been play around with these secret Stone to shed light on how they were used to find newfangled lands . Their finding have been published inProceedings of the Royal Society A.
A aventurine is a flat tile of crystalise calcium carbonate , know as Iceland spar . If you are in a area of passing low ignitor because of thick fog or a snowstorm , you hold it up to the sky and permit the visible radiation going through it polarize and disperse through a process of dual deflexion . It does this even when the Sun is haze over by weather condition .
The sailor would then have to find two celestial point in the confused brightness level of the sunstone . By moving the aventurine in front of their eyes and discover the changing intensity of the ignitor , they could determine the guidance the sunlight was do from . They then used that information to form an gauge position of the obscured Sun and combined it with info from a Viking sun - compass , a form of specialised sundial , so they could determine which management was North .
“ The theory of sky - polarimetric Viking pilotage has been wide accepted for decades without any information about the accuracy of this method , ” the sketch authors write . They brought this theory to the lab to see if and how it actually helped these whiskery Iron Age explorers .
They gathered 10 participant and necessitate them to attempt to get hold the office of the Sun in a digital planetarium after a brief run through of how it all works . More than 2,400 attempt later , they found that nigh one-half ( 48 percentage ) of the tests were more exact than not using a sunstone . In particular , the most accurate instances were when the Sun was intimately to the purview .
This led the researchers to conclude that the sunstone was a tool used during the early hours of break of day or during sundown , specially when the Sun was obscured by fog or snow . Also , since the aventurine worked best at these times , they even intimate that the Vikings could have actively set cruise and navigated during the morning or evening .
