Saros

Saros may refer to:

Places

Saros (astronomy)

The saros (ⁱ/ˈsɛərɒs/) is a period of approximately 223 synodic months (approximately 6585.3211 days, or 18 years, 11 days, 8 hours), that can be used to predict eclipses of the Sun and Moon. One saros period after an eclipse, the Sun, Earth, and Moon return to approximately the same relative geometry, a near straight line, and a nearly identical eclipse will occur, in what is referred to as an eclipse cycle. A sar is one half of a saros.

A series of eclipses that are separated by one saros is called a saros series.

History

The earliest discovered historical record of what we call the saros is by the Chaldeans (ancient Babylonian astronomers) in the last several centuries BC. It was later known to Hipparchus, Pliny and Ptolemy.

The name "saros" (Greek: σάρος) was applied to the eclipse cycle by Edmond Halley in 1691, who took it from the Suda, a Byzantine lexicon of the 11th century. The Suda says, "[The saros is] a measure and a number among Chaldeans. For 120 saroi make 2222 years according to the Chaldeans' reckoning, if indeed the saros makes 222 lunar months, which are 18 years and 6 months." The information in the Suda in turn was derived directly or otherwise from the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, which quoted Berossus. (Guillaume Le Gentil claimed that Halley's usage was incorrect in 1756, but the name continues to be used.) The Greek word apparently comes from the Babylonian word "sāru" meaning the number 3600.

Saro (Nigeria)

Saros or Creoles in Nigeria during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century were freed slaves who migrated to Nigeria in the beginning of the 1830s. They were known locally as Saros (elided form of Sierra Leone) or Amaros: migrants from Brazil and Cuba. Saros and Amaros also settled in other West African countries such as the Gold Coast (Ghana). They were mostly freed and repatriated slaves from various West African and Latin American countries such as Sierra Leone, Brazil and Cuba. Liberated "returnee" Africans from Brazil were more commonly known as "Agudas". Most of the Latin American returnees or Amaros started migrating to Africa after slavery was abolished on the continent while others from West Africa, or the Saros were recaptured and freed slaves already resident in Sierra Leone. Many of the returnees chose to return to Nigeria for cultural, missionary and economic reasons. Many (if not the greater majority) of them were originally descended from the Yoruba of western and central Nigeria. Other Nigerian groups forming part of the Sierra Leonean Krio population included Efik, Igbos, Hausa and Nupe.