He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe

make sure you don't press that button....

Sometimes I read things which are so utterly amazing that they cut through all of the day to day grind, the happenstance and seemingly mundane nature of existence to reawaken my youthful wonder and amazement at the universe. Sometimes the same article can confirm that we as a species are bless with the ability to be really fucking clever on occasion.

This seeming innocuous article at the register here  about the latest observations of Eta Carinea* is one such piece of writing. Basically ole Eta is far too big and far too bright to be a stable star. During the 1840’s the star looked like it had blown up and gone supernova but once the luminosity peak had passed the star was still there. The Supernova imposter event was widely noted at the time but since modern recording and analytics capability didn’t exist the event isn’t very well understood. However some very clever sods at the Space Telescope Science Institute realized that the light of the explosion could be reflected of clouds of dust about one hundred light years from the star. They’ve managed to capture enough of the reflected light to re-observe the event and determine the temperature and spectrum of the explosion light and draw some fascinating conclusions about it. 

This is clever stuff but for me it’s much more than just clever technique and great thinking. It’s about using the sheer scale of the universe as a time machine. Using a mirror nebula to look one hundred and seventy years into the past is amazing. It reinforces the scale of the place we live in. it underlines that mathematics and physics have a massive place in the universe. The concept of the Edington limit has always fascinated me and here we have an object so luminous its own brilliance is threatening to blow it apart and we have an example in our own stellar backyard a “mere” 76,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers away. The universe is a sodding big place and the old statement that it is defined not as being stranger than we know but stranger than we can know has rarely felt more real.

“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky”--Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C

* which is a seriously large star about eight thousand light years or so away. It’s very very very big, right up there at the top of current stellar models as a leader of the big , heavy and bright class and when it goes bang, and it will, we’ll have a light show of unparalleled magnitude**.  Read about this luminous heavy weight here Eta Carinae wiki

 

** That or be twatted in an instance if we’re staring down the barrel if it triggers a gamma ray burst (read about that “micro scale” thing here Gamma-ray burst wiki) this may have happened before, not caused by Eta Carinea of course, when one of these bad boys kicks off there is very little left apart from a rapidly spinning stellar black hole.