Update

It has been a while since I have posted on the blog.  This is mainly because I have been busy. The manuscript of A New Map of Wonders is just about done, and the book will be published in 2017.

Here are two among many passing wonders from the last few weeks. There is no particular connection between them apart from the fact that they both expand our sense of reality.

• Plants may ‘see’ underground by channelling light to their roots. Their stems may act like a fibre-optic cables, conducting light down to receptors in the roots known as phytochromes. These may trigger the production of a protein which promotes healthy root growth.

• Weather systems have been observed on an exoplanet for the first time. Massive storms move across the surface of HAT-P-7b, a thousand light years away. The clouds in its atmosphere are likely made of corundum, the mineral which forms rubies and sapphires.

The line between night and day

The Station goes around the world in an hour and a half, which means it flies through fifty minutes of day, followed by fifty minutes of night, endlessly repeating. This means that during a seven-hour spacewalk, you may see four sunrises and sunsets. I remember holding onto a handrail on the outside of the Station, which was flying silently up the Atlantic, from south to north, and as we moved toward Europe I could see the terminator—the line between night and day—rolling up over the horizon ahead of us. The white sun sank quickly behind us in a showy flurry of orange, pink, and red horizon bands, and then we were suddenly in twilight, floating into the dark half of the world. The terminator flicked over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city, glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me. I could see the structure of the city, with its glowing heart, its network of roads and its halo of suburban lights fading into the dark countryside. The city was Cairo, looking beautiful and radiant. Down there, millions of people were trying to make a living, find or keep a job, provide for themselves and their families, and worrying about the future. I could cover all of them with one outstretched hand. Cairo slid under and then behind me, and more cities rolled into view over the horizon, all tacked to the outside curve of the planet surface, and all seemingly moving toward us, rather than us toward them.

— Piers Sellers

Image via APOD

Two seconds of revelation

For generations most things people could see in the heavens never changed shape. The Moon and some comets were obvious exceptions.  Only recently has it been possible to see, with the aid of technology, the dynamism of the Sun's atmosphere, or movement in the clouds of Jupiter.

But images of change at larger scales — such as animations of galaxy evolution and distribution here and here — remain artefacts of reason, imagination and ingenuity rather than direct observation.

Our experience of stars, nebulae and supernovae is still mediated through static though often spectacular photographs.  Given how slowly the stars seem to change during a human lifetime this seems almost inevitable.

In this context, a clip showing fifteen years' expansion of the Tycho Brache Supernova remnant feels like something particularly remarkable, at least to me. At two seconds (blink and you'll miss it), it is the same length as the 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene, and no less momentous.

Big

The Copernican principle states that, on the large scale, the universe is homogenous and is nowhere special.  But it is reported that at least three phenomena call that into question:

A void almost 2 billion light years wide called the CMB coldspot. 

A structure strung out over 4 billion light years containing 73 quasars known as the Huge Large Quasar Group. 

A group of gamma-ray burst emitting galaxies that form a ring 5.6 billion light years across – 6% of the size of the entire visible universe.

Some physicists argue that these phenomena may be evidence for brane theory — the idea that what we perceive as our universe is a single four dimensional membrane floating in a sea of similar (mem)branes spanning multiple extra dimensions.

Image via Daily Galaxy

Weorold

It is the strangest of all places, and there is everything in the world to learn about it. It can keep us awake and jubilant with questions for millennia ahead if we learn not to meddle and not to destroy. Our great hope is in being such a young species, thinking in language only a short while, still learning, still growing up.

Seven Wonders by Lewis Thomas, before 1983

Weorold, the Old English for 'world', is a compound of wer, 'man', and eld, 'age'.  Thomas suggests the modern world itself as the first of his seven wonders, and notes that 'world' is derived from the Indo-European root wiros, which meant 'man' (apparently, the correct spelling is wiHrós).

Image: map of space debris orbiting Earth via Reddit

Randomly different initial conditions

Modern cosmology involves the idea of quantum genesis — tracing back the cosmic expansion to an origin in a singularity where the space that now contains 100 billion galaxies was smaller than an atom. The inflationary scenario is an adjustment of standard big bang to include an extremely early phase of exponential expansion. The idea was developed to explain why the universe now is very smooth and geometrically flat. Inflation has tentative support from the nature of small temperature variations in cosmic background radiation. If inflation is correct, the universe began as quantum fluctuation. The precursor state would have been an ensemble of quantum fluctuations, perhaps infinite in number, each with randomly different initial conditions. Some of them inflated into large space-times like our own. Others were still born. This process can be timeless and eternal.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey (2015)

Aurora

There to the east, the sky now glowed. Though it was still dark where they were, indigo filled much of the eastern sky. Then the infusion of gold in the indigo strengthened in intensity, and the whole eastern sky turned a dark bronze, then a dark green; then it brightened, until a blackish green was shot with gold, and brightened again until it was infused with greenish black, or rather a mix or mesh of gold and black, shimmering like cloth of gold seen by twilight. An uncanny sight, clearly, as many of them cried out at it. 

Then the burden off on the eastern horizon lit up as if set on fire, and their cries grew louder than ever. It looked as if the great plateau were burning. This strange fiery dawn swept in vertically, like a gold curtain of light approaching from the east.  Overhead the charcoal circle of E winked on its westernmost point, a brilliant wink of fire that quickly spilled up and down the outer curve of the black circle. And so Tau Ceti reemerged, again very slowly, taking a bit over two hours...Gradually the sky turned the usual royal blue of Aurora's day...

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (2015)

Strange planets

Methuselah, an exoplanet 12,400 light years away, is three times older than the Earth. Since it was formed within a billion years of the big bang, it's surprising that stars had made enough heavy elements and 'grit' to form a planet. The star 55 Cancri has a super-Earth so hot and dense that a third of the surface is made of carbon crushed into a diamond-like state...GJ 504b is a Jupiter that's farther from its star than Neptune is from the Sun. Even though it's in the deep freeze, it glows a ruddy pink colour because it's shrinking due to gravity. At the other extreme, there's a planet that orbits in darkness around a pulsar, whipping around the stellar corpse every two hours. TrES-2B is a mysteriously dark planet, blacker than coal or ink, and it's not known what chemicals in its atmosphere cause it to absorb 99 per cent of the light falling on it. GJ 1214b is a water world that's completely swaddled in ocean ten times deeper than those on Earth.  Wasp 18b is falling onto its star as its orbit degrades. It will enter the final death spiral in just a million years.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey (2015)

Image: NASA

Constellations of ingenious machines

Earlier this month Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted the English names of some constellations in the skies of the southern hemisphere. They are 'geeky', having been formally named during the Industrial Revolution. They include:

Antlia, The Air Pump,
Telescopium, The Telescope
Pyxis, The Compass
Microscopium, The Microscope
Fornax, The Lab Furnace
Horologium, The Pendulum Clock

Octans, The Octant
Sextans,The Sextant
and
Reticulum, The Eyepiece Crosshairs

The intimate Pleiades

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced dawning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.

Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton (1937)

Image: ESA

Space soufflé

Outer space...is a vast slow cooker. The densest interstellar gas may contain 10,000 hydrogen atoms in a cubic centimeter, and three or four carbon atoms. This is a thousand trillionth of the density of the air we breathe. An atom in deep space may travel 100,000 kilometers before bumping into a partner. 

But... a long underappreciated bevy of three protons and two electrons called protonated molecular hydrogen, or H3+, catalyzes a great network of reactions as elements collide, or stick to the surface of star-produced microscopic silicate and carbon dust grains. Over many millions of years, compounds as complex as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are manufactured, with dozens of carbon atoms in arrays of benzene rings. Other structures are precursors to amino acids...

Goodbye Copernicus, Hello Universe by Caleb Scharf.

See also Deep Space, Branching Molecules, and Life’s Origins?


Image: Ben McCall

A math of dreams

Players will begin at the outer edges of a galaxy containing 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets... 

Every player will begin on a randomly chosen planet at the outer perimeter of a galaxy. The goal is to head toward the center, to uncover a fundamental mystery, but how players do that, or even whether they choose to do so, is open to them. People can mine, trade, fight, or merely explore. As planets are discovered, information about them (including the names of their discoverers) is loaded onto a galactic map that is updated through the Internet. But, because of the game’s near-limitless proportions, players will rarely encounter one another by chance. As they move toward the center, the game will get harder, and the worlds—the terrain, the fauna and flora—will become more alien, more surreal.

from Word without end - creating a full scale digital cosmos by Raffi Khatchadourian


Image: Messier 82 NASA, ESA

1 googol AD

Today, the average density of matter in the visible Universe is a few hydrogen atoms per cubic metre; by 1 googol AD, that figure will have fallen to one electron or positron in a volume far, far bigger than today’s visible Universe.

via Michael Hanlon


Image: Abel 39 by Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona via wikimedia

Unafraid of the empty wastes

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 here

Image from Francis Godwin (1638)

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?

No underneath, no above

Here was the centre of the world, the sun swung round us; we rode at night straight away into the space of the stars. On a dry summer night, when there was no dew, I used to lie down on my back at full length (looking to the east), on the grass footpath by the orchard, and gaze up into the sky. This is the only way to get at it and feel the stars: while you stand upright, the eye, and through the eye, the mind, is biased by the usual aspect of things: the house there, the trees yonder; it is difficult to forget the mere appearance of rising and setting. Looking straight up like this, from the path to the stars, it was clear and evident that I was really riding among them; they were not above, nor all round, but I was in the midst of them. There was no underneath, no above: everything was on a level with me; the sense of measurement and distance disappeared. As one walks in a wood, with trees all about, so then by day (when the light only hid them) I walked amongst the stars. I had not got then to leave this world to enter space: I was already there.

— from The Old House at Coate by Richard Jefferies, quoted by Rebecca Welshman

I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

— Henry David Thoreau

"We rarely recall our sense of being in the stars," says Charles Ross. His sculpture Star Axis is meant to offer "a place for that remembering."


Image: part of Eagle Nebula seen in infrared. NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team via Ethan Siegel.

The light backward

When we see images of distant stars and galaxies we look far back in time.  It is an extraordinary and rather wonderful fact, but also alien from normal experience.

Looking at this image of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is different.  Because light reflected off the comet takes only about half an hour to reach the Earth we are seeing it almost as it is in real time – that is, in the time of actual lived experience.

We see a degree of detail so far unrealised for such a distant object – albeit one that is of course vastly closer than any star.

We see a strange mini-world with terrain imaginable for human feet.



Image: ESA

A protoplanetary disk

HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets.

— Catherine Vlahakis quoted in ESO press release, 6 November 2014.  HL Tauri is about four hundred and fifty light-years away.


Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NSF

A dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension

Among many extraordinary images in Cosmigraphics by Michael Benson (2014) is a seldom-reproduced depiction of the black void before the light of creation from Utriusque comsi... by Robert Fludd. [1]

Benson notes a similarity to Kazimir Malevich's Black Square on a White Ground (1915) [2]

Anselm Kiefer pays homage to Fludd in works such as The Secret Life of Plants (1987-2014). Equally striking, to me at least, is Kiefer's For Ingeborg Bachmann: the Renewed Orders of the Night. [3]  In this work, hundreds (perhaps) of small diamonds embedded in a large sheet of textured lead shine like stars as one approaches, and like rainbows as one gets even closer.  It seems like something that could emerge out of Fludd's primal black.


Notes

[1] A selection of more frequently reproduced images at Public Domain Review

[2] As Julian Bell notes, Malevich declared:

I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things...
I have released all the birds from the eternal cage...
I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour!...
I have overcome the impossible...

[3] I can't at present find a reproduction of this image.

Into this wild Abyss, the womb of Nature

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space. Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013.