Black Holes Are Nasty

Black Holes Are Nasty

Or maybe this isn’t a black hole and I’m headed toward a naked singularity. Near a singularity, casualty could be violated, effects could precede causes, time could flow backward, and you were unlikely to survive, much less remember the experience.

For a rotating black hole, Elie dredged up from her studies years before, there as not a point but a ring singularity or something still more complex to be avoided. Black holes are nasty. The gravitational tidal forces were so great that you would be stretched into a long this thread if you were so careless as to fall in. You would also be crushed laterally.

Through the gray transparent surfaces that were now the ceiling and floor, she could see a great flurry of activity. The organosilicate matrix was collapsing on itself in some places and unfolding in others; the embedded erbium dowels were spinning and tumbling. Everything inside the dodec looked quite ordinary.

A giant planet. Black Holes are the most exciting mystery in the Universe. Image: © Elena

The pentagonal panels of the dodecahedron had become transparent. Above and below she could make out the organosilicate lacework and the implanted erbium dowels, which seemed to be stirring. All three benzels had disappeared. The dodecahedron plunged, racing down a long dark tunnel just broad enough to permit its passage. There was a texture to the tunnel walls, from which Elie could sense their speed. The patterns were irregular softedged mottlings, nothing with a well-defined form. The walls were not memorable for their appearance, only for their functions.

Every now and then a forward vertex of the dodecahedron would brush the wall, and flakes of an unknown material would be scraped off. The dodec itself seemed unaffected. The faint yellow lighting was diffuse, uniform.

Back holes were either primordial – made during the origin of the universe – or produced in a later epoch by the collapse of a star more massive than the Sun. Then, the gravity would be so strong that – except for quantum effects – even light could not escape, although the gravitational field certainly would remain. Hence “black’, hence “holes”.

But the black holes didn’t collapse a star, and she couldn’t see any way in which they had captured a primordial black hole.

Why Martians

Why Martians?

For all of our history there has been the fear or hope that there might be life beyond the Earth. In the last centuries this premonition has focused on a bright red point of light in the night sky. In 1894, a Bostonian named Percival Lowell founded a major observatory where the most elaborate claims in support of life on Mars were developed.

Why so many eager speculations and ardent fantasies about Martians rather than, say Saturnians or Plutonians? Because Mars seems at first glance very Earthlike. It is the nearest planet whose surface we can see. There are polar ice caps, drifting white clouds, raging dust storms, seasonally changing patterns on its red surface, even a twenty-four-hour day.

It is tempting to think of it as an inhabited world. Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears. But our psychological predispositions pro or con must not mislead us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evidence is not yet in. The real Mars is a world of wonders. Its future prospects are far more intriguing than our past apprehensions about it. In our time we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams.

But Lowell’s lifelong love was the planet Mars. Image Magic Castle Midnight Moonlight by Elena

Percival Lowell dabbled in astronomy as a young man, went to Harvard, secured a semi-official diplomatic appointment to Korea, and otherwise engaged in the usual pursuits of the wealthy. Before he died in 1916, he had made major contributions to our knowledge of the nature and evolution of the planets, to the deduction of the expanding universe and, in a decisive way, to the discovery of the planet Pluto, which is named after him (the first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell).

Blues for a Red Planet

Blues For a Red Planet

Many years ago, so the story goes, a celebrated newspaper publisher sent a telegram to a noted astronomer: Were collect immediately five hundred words on whether there is life on Mars. The astronomer dutifully replied: Nobody knows, nobody knows, nobody knows… 250 times. But despite this confession of ignorance, asserted with dogged persistence by an expert, no one paid and heed, and from that time to this, we hear authoritative pronouncements by those who think they have deduced life on Mars, and by those who think they have excluded it.

Some people very much want there to be life on Mars; others very much want there to be no life on Mars. There have been excesses in both camps. These strong passions have somewhat frayed the tolerance for ambiguity that is essential to science. There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time. Some scientists have believed that Mars in inhabited on what has later proved to be the flimsiest evidence. Others have concluded the planet is lifeless because a preliminary search for a particular manifestation of life has been unsuccessful or ambiguous. The blues have been played more than once for the red planet.

In the orchards of the gods, he watches the canals (Enuma Elish, Sumer, c. 2500 B.C.) Image: © Megan Jorgensen

A man that is of Copernicus’ Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlightn’d by the Sun, like the rest of them, cannot but sometimes have a fancy… that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, nay and their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours… But we were always apt to conclude, that ‘twas inn vain to enquire after what Nature had been pleased to do there, seeing there was no likelihood of ever coming to an end of the Enquiry… but a while ago, thinking somewhat seriously on this matter (not that I count myself quicker sighted than those great men of the past, but that I had the happiness to live after most of them, me thoughts the Enquiry was no so impracticable nor the way so stopt up with difficulties, but that there was very good room left for probable Conectures.

(Christiaan Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c. 1690).

Life on Mars

Life On Mars

Percival Lowell was electrified by the announcement in 1877 by an Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, of canali on Mars. Schiaparelli had reported during a close approach of Mars to Earth an intricate network of single and double straight lines crisscrossing the bright areas of the planet. Canali in Italian means channels or grooves, but was promptly translated into English as canals through Europe and America, and Lowell found himself swept up with it.

Later, in 1892, his eyesight failing, Schiaparelli announced he was giving up observing Mars. Lowell resolved to continue the work. He wanted a first-rate observing site, undisturbed by clouds or city lights and marked by good “seeing”, the astronomer’s term for a steady atmosphere through which the shimmering of an astronomical image in the telescope is minimized. Bad seeing is produced by small-scale turbulence in the atmosphere above the telescope and is the reason of the stars twinkle.

Viking Orbits Mars. No sign of the fabled canals on Mars. Image by NASA in public domain

Isaac Newton had written “If the Theory of making Telescope could at length be fully brought into practice, yet there would be certain Bounds beyond which Telescopes could not perform. For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in perpetual tremor. The only remedy is the most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser Cloud”.

Percival Lowell built his observatory far away from home, on Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona. He sketched the surface features of Mars, particularly the canals, which mesmerized him. Observations of this sort are not easy. You put in long hours at the telescope in the chill of the early morning. Often the seeing is poor and the image of Mars blurs and distorts. Then you must ignore what you have seen. Occasionally the image steadies and the features of the Planet flash out momentarily, marvellously. You must then remember what has been vouchsafed to you and accurately commit it to paper. You must put your preconceptions aside and with an open mind set down the wonders of Mars.

Collision of a Comet With a Planet

Collision of a Comet With a Planet

Modern planetary scientists sometimes argue that a collision of a comet with a planet might make a significant contribution to the planetary atmosphere. For example, all the water in the atmosphere of Mars today could be accounted for by a recent impact of a small comet. Newton noted that the matter in the tails of comets is dissipated in interplanetary space, los to the comet and little by little attracted gravitationally to nearby planets. He believed that the water on the Earth is gradually being lost, “spent upon vegetation and putrefaction, and converted into dry earth…. The fluids, if they are not supplied from without, must be in a continual decrease, and quite fail at last”. Newton seems to have believed that the Earth’s oceans are of cometary origin, and that life is possible only because cometary matter falls upon our planet. In a mystical reverie, he went still further: “I suspect, moreover, that it is chiefly from the comets that spirit comes, which is indeed the smallest but the most subtle and useful part of our air, and so much required to sustain the life of all things with us”.

Comet West. Anti-comet pills are our salvation. Image Flashing Picture by Megan Jorgensen

As early as 1868 the astronomer William Huggins found an identity between some features in the spectrum of a comet and the spectrum of natural or “olefiant” gas. Huggins had found organic matter in the comets; in subsequent years cyanogen, CN, consisting of a carbon and a nitrogen atom, the molecular fragment that makes cyanides, was identified in the tails of comets. When the Earth was about to pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet in 1910, many people panicked. They overlooked the fact that the tail of a comet is extravagantly diffuse: the actual danger from the poison in a comet’s trail is far less than the danger, even in 1910, from industrial pollution in large cities.

But that reassured almost no one. For example, headlines in the San Franciso Chroncile for May 15, 1910, include “Comet Camera as Big as a House”, “Comet Comes and Husband Reforms”, “Comet Parties Now Fad in New York”. The Los Angeles Examiner adopted a light mood: “Say! Has That Comet Cyanogened You Yet?”, “Entire Human Rase Due for Free Gaseouys Bath”, “Expect High Jinks”, “Many Feel Cyanogen Tang”, “Victim Climbe Trees, Tries to Phone Comet”. In 1910 there were parties making merry before the world ended of cyanogen pollution. Entrepreneurs hawked anti-comet pills and gas masks, the latter an eerie premonition of the battlefields of World War I.