Sirius in fiction below)—and even if such were eventually discovered, with an estimated age of 230 million years the system is too young to have fostered the development of life or a complex biosphere. Sirius AB is the alpha star of the constellation Canis Major (the great dog, sometimes styled as Orion's hunting dog), whence its cognomen "the dog star". The most commonly used proper name of this star comes through the Latin "Sirius", from the Greek Σείριος ("Seirios", "glowing" or "scorcher"). The ancient Greeks observed that the appearance of Sirius heralded the hot and dry "dog days" of summer, and feared that
Sirius four Galilean moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. This has been the subject of controversy and speculation. Doubts have been raised about the validity of Griaule and Dieterlein's work. In a 1991 article in "Current Anthropology" anthropologist Walter van Beek concluded after his research among the Dogon that, "Though they do speak about "sigu tolo" [which is what Griaule claimed the Dogon called Sirius] they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the "sigu" [festival], for another it is Venus that, through