Maximum strangeness with maximum simplicity

It is cheering to think than an object so different from all others, a from that achieves the maximum strangeness with the maximum simplicity and regularity and harmony, is rotating in the sky. 

 “If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now,” Mr Palomar thinks, “they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato’s ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.”

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino (1983)


Image: NASA

On First Looking into J1407b

The ring system of J1407b is nearly 120 million kilometres in diameter, or more than two hundred times as large as the rings of Saturn (report).

Images: Matthew Kenworthy/Leiden and Ron Miller.

How would the rings look in UV?

Beyond the rings of Saturn

The hexagon on Saturn is a six-sided hurricane sixty miles deep [and with a circumference that could accommodate] four Earths. It’s ringed by winds of ammonia and hydrogen blowing at 220mph. The storm was seen by the Voyager spacecraft when they passed by in the early 80s. That was the last time until recently that sunlight graced the north pole of Saturn, which takes 30 of our years to make one circuit of the Sun. Soon after the Voyagers departed winter descended. Saturn’s rings tipped away from us, plunging the north pole into fifteen years of darkness. Without sunlight, astronomers were limited to infrared images. They showed the hexagon was still there. But what is it? 

The hexagon is a narrow jet stream that circles the north pole. Researchers think that friction with the clouds on either side of it creates eddies — mini-storms — that push the jet stream into a wave-like shape as it spins around. By spinning water columns at different speeds, scientists have been able to reproduce the six-sided pattern in the lab. In January 2009 the sun began its slow rise in Saturn’s north. Summer was coming. The Cassini spacecraft was there to see it [and passed] right over the storm for a closer look.

— from Storm chasing on Saturn by Dennis Overbye et al.

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.

— from a letter by Johannes Kepler to Galileo Galileo written in 1610, cited by Ross Andersen.

Image: NASA