Apr 27 2009
Kids: Don’t Do Drugs, Study Astronomy
I had my mind blown this weekend. And it wasn’t from inhaling, snorting or drinking a mind-altering substance. I read some science. The hard stuff.
Alright, it is a Monday morning so maybe you won’t find the material as potent. But man. Sip these four points from new astronomical research and see if your mind goes a-tripping:
1. Water has been discovered. Not on Earth. Not on Mars. It is being ejected by a “supermassive” black hole (not just a black hole or a massive black hole but a supermassive black hole!) at the center of a distant galaxy.
2. The water is part of a maser. Like a laser, but with microwaves.
[M]olecules in the gas amplify and emit beams of microwave radiation in much the same way as a laser emits beams of light.
3. How did they detect it? No, not with a supermassive telescope lens. With a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing.”
The faint signal is only detectable by using a technique called gravitational lensing, where the gravity of a massive galaxy in the foreground acts as a cosmic telescope, bending and magnifying light from the distant galaxy.
Feeling a bit woozy yet? You might want to switch to some lighter reading material.
4. It took the information about the water, transported by the radiation, 11.1 billion years to reach Earth. However . . .
because the Universe has expanded like an inflating balloon in that time, stretching out the distances between points, the galaxy in which the water was detected is about 19.8 billion light years away.
Dude. You kidding me? Wow.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to return to planet Earth. Which is pretty wild itself. In fact, between episodes of typing I have been gazing past my desk out a window and upon very strange growths coming up out of the ground. They are like lumpy poles with smaller lumpy poles projecting out and up from the main pole, and hanging off the smallest poles are green radiation-converter-things. Crazy.
Dude! Outer space rocks! As does local space! But what IS space?! Maybe I’ll put aside that question for now. It’s Monday morning and I have a lot of work to do.
[...] space rocks! Andrew, at The Evolving Mind, gives us proof that it isn’t just drugs than can blow our minds! Black holes are [...]