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<\/p>\nThe United States is entering a dark age, and you, dear readers of the Daily Kos, and your peers will be the primary victims of kleptocratic obscurantism. Perhaps I am being a bit too pessimistic, as I believe the November elections will not proceed as usual. <\/p>\n
In any case, I am working on a series of popular science articles that I have titled \u201cThe Most Beautiful Nebulae.\u201d I am submitting the first article, which will focus on the Crab Nebula, and I hope you will enjoy it. Happy reading, and stay strong.<\/p>\n
The Crab Nebula, Hubble, Nasa<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Lantern and the Scar<\/p>\n
Good evening . Please, sit down. The night is cool, the telescope is at rest, and I happen to have just the thing to guide us tonight. No, not a basketball this time, I have something else in store for you. A watch, perhaps, or rather a lantern. Yes, a lantern glowing in the darkness, like the one I sometimes carry on moonless nights when I walk down the path from the observatory. Tonight, it will be a Chinese lantern, a single one, set upon the table, its flame flickering softly. This is the entire Milky Way. One hundred thousand light-years in diameter, two hundred billion stars, spiral arms, a central bulge, a halo of dark matter. All of it, contained within the flame of my lantern.<\/p>\n
And at the heart of this flame, I am going to tell you the story of a small scar. A lacework of gas and dust stretching across the constellation Taurus. An object every amateur astronomer knows, every professional venerates, and which I consider to be one of the purest jewels of the winter sky. The Crab Nebula.<\/p>\n
1. A Scar in the Flame<\/p>\n
Let us return to our scale. The flame of this lantern, then, is the Milky Way. One hundred thousand light-years across. That means that light, racing along at three hundred thousand kilometres per second, takes one hundred thousand years to cross our galaxy from edge to edge. One hundred thousand years. That is the time that separates us from the era when the first Homo sapiens left Africa in successive waves, when they painted the walls of the caves of Sulawesi, when they invented the first funerary rites. One hundred thousand years of light. That is the breath of our galaxy.<\/p>\n
Within this lantern, the Crab Nebula is a tiny speck of luminescent dust. A confetti. A sequin. Its actual size is about eleven light-years in diameter. That may seem immense, and indeed it is: eleven light-years is seventy thousand times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. To give you a truer sense of this dimension, eleven light-years is almost three times the distance that separates us from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us. Proxima is 4.2 light-years away. If you were to place the Crab Nebula between the Sun and Proxima, it would not fit within the gap; it would overflow it by a wide margin, engulfing both stars and all the surrounding space along the way. This nebula is a monster of gas and dust, an expanding bubble that devours light and void.<\/p>\n
And yet, on the scale of the Milky Way, it is an infinitesimal dot. On our lantern, it measures a tenth of a millimetre. A fraction of a grain of dust, resting delicately upon the glass.<\/p>\n
And its distance from us? It lies roughly six thousand five hundred light-years from Earth. Six thousand five hundred light-years. This means that the light we see today from the Crab Nebula left its gaseous filaments in the Neolithic, when human beings were inventing agriculture in Mesopotamia, when wheat and barley were being domesticated, when the first sheep were being raised. We never see the Crab Nebula as it is, but as it was sixty-five centuries ago. And, on the scale of the lantern, where is it? Six and a half millimetres from the wick. Just over half a centimetre. A speck of dust lying half a centimetre from the source of light. That is our place in the galaxy: we are a tiny spark, and this nebula is another spark, almost pressed up against us, and yet separated by an abyss of time and space.<\/p>\n
2. What We See: The Lacework of the Explosion<\/p>\n
Let us now speak of what the telescope reveals. For the Crab Nebula is no simple cloud. It is a tangle of intertwined filaments, glowing red, green, blue, a true cosmic spider\u2019s web. Astronomers call it a supernova remnant. It is the expanding corpse of a star that exploded. And it is that very explosion that we contemplate.<\/p>\n
The composition of this lacework is an alchemy of death and life. The filaments we see are mainly made of ionised hydrogen, which glows red, and helium. But they also contain oxygen, carbon, neon, sulphur, iron. The heavy elements forged in the core of the vanished star and scattered by the detonation. The greenish hue you can observe through a telescope, in the central region, comes from doubly ionised oxygen, a rare and magnificent spectral signature. This gas is still heated to temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, and it continues to expand at a speed of fifteen hundred kilometres per second. Fifteen hundred kilometres per second. At that speed, you could circle the Earth in twenty-six seconds. And this expansion has been going on for a thousand years.<\/p>\n
For the Crab Nebula has an age known with a precision that is rare in astronomy. It was born in the year 1054 of our era. On the 4th of July 1054, to be precise, or thereabouts, a massive star exhausted its nuclear fuel and collapsed upon itself. The shockwave tore apart its outer layers, hurling the equivalent of several solar masses of matter into space. On Earth, Chinese astronomers of the Song dynasty recorded the appearance of a \u201cguest star\u201d in the constellation of Taurus. A star so bright that it was visible in broad daylight for twenty-three days, and at night for nearly two years. The Anasazi people of New Mexico may have left a trace of it on a rock wall. Arab and Japanese chroniclers also noted it. All around the world, men and women raised their eyes and saw this new light, without knowing that they were witnessing the death of a star and the birth of a legend.<\/p>\n
3. The Heart of the Monster: The Pulsar<\/p>\n
But I have not yet told you of the strangest part. At the centre of the Crab Nebula, where the core of the star collapsed, lies an object astronomers call a pulsar. It is a neutron star, a ball of degenerate matter about twenty kilometres in diameter. Twenty kilometres, the size of a modest city. But this ball weighs one and a half times the mass of the Sun. A thimbleful of this matter would weigh billions of tonnes.<\/p>\n
And this pulsar spins upon itself thirty times per second. Thirty rotations per second. Imagine a cosmic lighthouse, a beam of radiation sweeping across space with every turn. That is exactly what it is: with each rotation, the pulsar emits a powerful beam of radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays that our telescopes capture with staggering regularity. The Crab Pulsar is one of the most precise objects in the universe. Its regularity rivals that of atomic clocks. And yet it is slowing, imperceptibly, by a fraction of a second per century, releasing a colossal energy that powers the entire nebula.<\/p>\n
It is this energy that makes the filaments glow. Without the pulsar, the Crab Nebula would have been a cold, dark shell long ago. But the pulsar injects a wind of relativistic particles, a wind of electrons and positrons accelerated to near the speed of light, which collides with the expanding gases and illuminates them. The Crab Nebula is thus a perfect thermodynamic machine, a laboratory of extreme physics, visible from a distance of six thousand five hundred light-years.<\/p>\n
4. The Lesson of the Crab<\/p>\n
I return to my lantern. The flame flickers. I gaze at that half-centimetre that separates us, on the galactic scale, from the Crab Nebula. It is so close, and yet unreachable. The light reaching us today set off when the pyramids of Egypt did not yet exist, when Stonehenge was but a circle of rough stones, when people spoke vanished languages without leaving written traces. And yet this light is fresh, young, vibrant; it speaks to us of an event that occurred only a thousand years ago. A blink of an eye in the life of the galaxy.<\/p>\n
The Crab Nebula is a cosmic memento mori. It reminds us that everything in the universe is transitory. Stars are born, they live, they die, and sometimes they explode, illuminating the heavens. We ourselves are the children of these explosions. The iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, the oxygen you breathe were forged in supernovae similar to the Crab, billions of years ago. We are literally made of supernova dust. And when I point my telescope at that small, blurry patch in Taurus, I do not see only a nebula. I see a mirror. I see our origin. I see a stellar grandmother who, in dying, sowed the seeds of our existence.<\/p>\n
So, the next time you catch a glimpse, even fleetingly, of a photograph of the Crab Nebula, think of this. A star died in 1054. A Chinese king saw it. An Arab peasant noted it. An Anasazi priest may have painted it. And we, astronomers of the twenty-first century, we still gaze at it, with our instruments of glass and metal, and we read within it the story of our own matter. The lantern crackles. The night is deep. And the small, luminous speck of dust, half a centimetre from the flame, continues to expand, silent, in the frozen void of the galax<\/p>\n
Stay safe and happy<\/p>\n
Fran\u00e7ois<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States is entering a dark age, and you, dear readers of the Daily Kos, and your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,235871,392],"class_list":["post-465643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-scitech","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}