On Wednesday, astronomers observed an exploding star whose gamma-ray burst "ranks as the most intrinsically bright object in the universe ever observed by humans." Bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, though half a universe away. 2.5 million times brighter than the brightest supernova ever recorded. And the part that really knocks me out: the star's massive death happened more than 7.5 billion years ago!
That's a few billion years before Earth existed--and Polish astronomers caught the blast on film here.
As a kid, I loved astronomy, so my knowledge of the way these things work isn't entirely new, but it's still exciting to contemplate. That the night sky is all artifact. That looking up, it's not merely the snapshot of a single distant moment in time that one observes, but a dizzying simultaneity of moments. 101 years into the past at the tip of the Big Dipper's handle. 81 years where handle meets bowl. 800 years, 1,300 years, and 900 years along Orion's belt. The 2.5 million year-old smudge known as the Andromeda Galaxy.
I want to know more. All those photons hurtling through the universe unimpeded for hundreds or millions or billions of years, until some of them are swallowed up by my eye, and cease to exist as photons. But what do they become? Me and the stargazer lily I bought yesterday are both sucking up sunlight. The lily is turning that energy into mass, using it to transform my breath into petals and leaves and stems. My eye, on the other hand, is translating energy into...an awareness of energy? The photons trigger an electrical impulse that excites my visual cortex. But then what? Where does that energy, which cannot be destroyed, go? Is it just body heat? If I put my warm hand on another's cold skin, am I passing along the byproduct of witnessing distant thermonuclear fusions?
Unfortunately, those couple paragraphs were way more time than I intended to spend accessing the Internet's vast stores of information. A waste of time, you might say. Process without commodifiable product. A luxury and an indulgence. Why does that seem wrong to me?
Comments
Because we live in a culture that tries to commodify everything, even time.
I have a strong amateur interest in all of the sciences, though because I've only studied any of them minimally (at least in a classroom sense), I have a lot of gaps in my knowledge. Offhand I'm not sure what happens to the electrical charges after they go to the visual cortex.
Don't know if you've ever checked out Stephen Hawking's book "A Short History of Time." I haven't read all of it -- it's one of the zillion books on my list of ones I'd like to finish at some point -- but I really liked what I've read of it. Lots of wonderful (and potentially difficult) concepts explained with simple brilliance.
For example -- that one of the proofs that the universe is finite, that time is finite, is that if it were infinite, there would be much more light everywhere, because the stars would have been emitting their light forever (at the rate of emission that is known and measurable).
But the sky gets dark at night. The stars haven't been emitting light forever. From this, says Hawking, we know that the universe is finite. At some point, a knowable and definable point, it began.
Posted by: Lyle Daggett | March 24, 2008 10:16 PM