Color post: Magic in the world today
When I was in junior high, my parents gave me a 60mm refracting telescope as a gift for Christmas along with one of those "Golden Field Guides" in Astronomy. This was a very suitable gift for the growing geek that I was, but for the first several months it went unused as I studied that little field guide over and over again, but never quite figured out how to really use the telescope to find things that I wanted. Except the top of the telephone pole down the street. Or a squirrel on a tree 8 blocks away. (And no-- I was much too much of a prude in those days to use it for peeping-tommery. Image would have been upside-down and reversed anyway. And the whole telescope shook on its little wooden legs if you so much as breathed on it.)
Anyway, later that spring or summer our next-door neighbor, who was an avid member of the Boise Astronomical Society, decided to throw a star-party for our whole street. (Which worked really well, since we lived on a really-long cul-de-sac. We just had to run around putting paper bags over the lights on those houses whose residents weren't home.) He set his 10" schmitt-cassegrain up at the corner of his drive-way (which bordered ours), and after about a half-hour of embarrassed shyness, I finally ran in and grabbed my little scope and set it up about 10 feet from his. I remember that he was impressed that I was able to find objects in the sky (which he was using his computer to locate) just by looking at which direction his 'scope was pointed.
Over the next couple years, about once a month during the warmer months, 40-something-year-old-with-two-kids-of-his-own Bob White would come knocking on our door and ask my parents if little Steve could come stargazing with him. We'd only stay out until 1:00am or so, and half the sky was obscured by the light-pollution of Boise, but it was a lot of fun all the same, and I saw a lot of really neat things (most of which to the untrained observer might just look like a little fuzzy patch in the sky-- but I knew what they really were).
...and that's really what got me started with my love of all things celestial.
Now there's one thing you have to understand about amateur astronomers: Most of us, even if we own fairly large 'scopes, see the exact same thing you do when you look at most celestial objects: Dim, fuzzy splotches. There are a number of objects in the sky that look considerably cooler than this (big, large nebulae like the one in Orion; planets; the moon; solar prominences), but for the most part, most things you're going to see in an average amateur telescope on an average night are going to look like dim, fuzzy splotches.
The excitement comes from knowing something about those fuzzy splotches. Sure, that might just look like a dim cigar-shaped splotch on its side, but it's really the Andromeda Galaxy, which is also happens to be the farthest object you can see with the naked eye. That light that's reaching your eyes at this very moment left those stars 2 million years ago... and it's still bright enough for you to see without any special equipment! And if we did have the right equipment for a long-exposure photo, you'd be able to see just how wonderous that dim fuzzy cigar-shaped thing really is.
The heavens are, in my opinion, one of the most interesting areas for new discovery about which we know so very little. Humans have been looking up for eons, but only for the last several hundred years have we known enough about optics to really get a good look at the sky. And only in the last hundred years or so have we known enough about some of the non-visible radiation coming from the heavens to even start observing it. There's so incredibly much we don't know about the things that're up there... This area of science is very much still in the "mind-blowingly-huge-discoveries-are-being-made" stage. Around 80 years ago we first started theorizing about black-holes. 40 years ago, a good portion of the scientific and popular community had accepted their existence as fact. About 2-5 years ago we discovered more about how these black holes must behave that what we think they are now is so different from the "fact" we had 40 years ago, the classic "black hole" ideas might as well be shuffled away to the realm of microscopic magic pixies and other such non-sense. (And thank you, Brian Derksen, for that phrase.)
It's so good to see that our scientists can make hypotheses and theories about the ultimate cosmology of the universe, and have these overturned a scarce few years later by new data. It means to me that there's still magic in the world-- there's so much we simply don't know about those really big questions about Life, the Universe and Everything (42), that there's a lot of room for us new-comers to the planet to stand on the shoulders of our giant predecessors and reach just a little bit farther toward those enigmatic twinkling stars.
My data is a little dated (feel free to correct if you know more information); Admittedly, it's been a while since I really poured over this information; But here are a couple things that we, with all of our knowledge and wisdom, are nowhere close to even having the remotest idea how to explain:
1. Cosmic rays are very-high-energy gamma rays that typically hit the upper atmosphere and run into some matter there. This (usually gaseous) matter then explodes into a bunch of sub-atomic fragments, which then hit other bits of matter, which then explode... and so on, until you have what amounts to a relatively small, invisible shower of X-ray sparks, that has enough energy to start at the outer-limits of our atmosphere and make it all the way to surface-mounted observing equipment (of course, not every bit of matter in the path gets pulverized-- humans and animals have been getting hit with these things without any noticable harmful effects since life began on this planet. Or so we assume.). The scientific community is a bit sketchy on cosmic rays: I've heard estimates that the Earth gets hit anywhere between once or twice a week to 20 or more times a day with these guys.
So where do they come from? Supernovas. High-energy quasars. Maybe some of them come from freakishly-high-energy phenomena happening on the sun. Maybe some extremely large "black hole" is shooting them out of its poles. Well, these are some of the guesses anyway... and they're probably right, because the numbers work out right: These kinds of celestial events are bleeding energy fast enough to produce gamma rays that would still have that kind of energy behind them even after traveling the untold thousands of light-years of space to our little blue watery rock.
But... there's a problem: In the early 90's a cosmic-ray observing device nicknamed the Fly's Eye because it, well, looked like a fly's eye saw a cosmic ray so energetic that it lit up the whole sky with X-rays and drove the eye's sensors off the charts. At first they figured the thing was mal-functioning. The cosmic ray observed would have had to have at least 5-6 orders of magnitude more energy than any previously-observed single particle (think millions of times more powerful than any previously-seen cosmic ray), and such at thing couldn't be because there was no known event at all that could produce that kind of energy in a single particle.
And then... well, the Fly's Eye saw another one about a year later. And this time they could prove the damned thing wasn't mal-functioning. And then it happened again, with a different piece of cosmic-ray sensing equipment. So... it's kind of entertaining to see the scientists scratching their heads over this one. How do you explain a particle/wave moving with more energy than anything in the known or even theorized universe has any hope of producing? What causes these Ultra-High Energy (UHE) Cosmic Rays? We simply don't know, and don't really have any good hypotheses at this point. (Read more at http://www.cosmic-ray.org/reading/uhecr.html )
2. I'm sure most of you are familiar with science's best efforts to explain the origin of our solar system. For those of you who aren't, here it is in a nutshell:
A Really Long Time Ago (many billions of years), there was a very, very large star somewhere near where our solar system now is. It exploded in a massive super-nova and left a bunch of molecule-sized bits floating in space in its wake. Over a Very Long Time, the mutual gravity and other forces between these countless bits eventually caused them to move together. And as they moved together, they started forming a spinning gaseous disc. The little bits in this disc started glomming together to form slightly larger bits. these glommed together to form even larger small bits, and so on and so forth until still-rather-small nearly-sperical bits formed that we call planets.
This is all fine and good and is corroborated by a lot of observable facts: Forming a disc makes sense because the combined angular momentum (thats the spin) of all of the little molecule-sized bits coming together would make the system as a whole start spinning. (And, incidentally, spin faster and faster as it moved inward-- like a balerina drawing her hands in when spinning.) And if you spin an amorphous sphere around fast enough, it turns into a disc. And having the planets form out of the disc is nice because we can observe that most of the planets all lie in approximately the same orbital plane in space, like good little disc-formed planets should.
The problem? Well, when we starting looking at that whole "glomming" idea... it just doesn't work. The math we have tells us that little molecule-sized things bumping into each other in space will bounce off each other and keep going. In fact, you need to have a rather large object indeed before the math says it'll actually stick together, due to gravity, sub-atomic forces, electro-magnetic forces or whatever.
All our science points to the above process being *the* way the solar system formed. In fact, we have even observed what we believe are disc-shaped proto-solar-systems in the Hubble pictures of the Eagle nebula. I guess the devil's in the details.
Now, mind you, I'm certainly not writing this with the idea that all our science in these areas is flawed and incorrect. Nor am I writing this to support or dissent with creationist ideas. What I'm saying is that I think it's really cool that in our modern age our best thinkers are still baffled by some of the things happening around us every day. It means, again, that there's plenty of room for us new-comers to make our own earth-shakingly-shocking discoveries.
And...
And...
Well, there are a whole bunch of little details like this that get skipped over, especially when you go beyond the easily-digestible summaries one usually finds in science books, in popular media, and just about everything except the research that is riding on the bleeding-edge of discovery. These things are there if you look for them, waiting for someone to discover them.
...
My telescope has been upgraded to my own 8" schmitt-cassegrain, although I don't go stargazing nearly as much as I should anymore. I doubt I'll ever make any mind-blowingly-huge discoveries of my own-- I've not pursued the right career or lifestyle to do so.
But it makes me happy that there's still magic in the world.
Thanks,
SR "Jack Horkheimer is my hero" Foxley