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There have been three distinct space discoveries released to the public within the past couple of days. You might have seen them pop up on the Trending section of your Facebook page, or maybe you read about them on Slate Magazine’s website. If you haven’t heard about them, what you read next may, in fact, blow your mind.
Phil Plait contributed three articles to Slate Magazine’s website within the past two days. The article titled “A Supermassive Black Hole’s Fiery and Furious Wind” is a brain-bender by itself. According to Plait’s explanations, material that gets sucked into a black hole “can be heated to terrifyingly high temperatures, millions of degrees, causing it to glow fiercely bright.” Believe it or not, this swirling of energy creates an intense wind.
Astronomers using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observatories have discovered, according to Plait, “the unmistakable signature of gas expanding outward in a sphere.” Based on this geometric discovery, the astronomers were able to calculate how these gases blast around the black hole in all directions. Plait promises his math is correct, and he claims that “the mechanical energy in that wind is a staggering 10 trillion times the total energy the Sun emits every second.” Let that one sink in a bit.
His second article, titled “Did I say there was one shiny spot on the Asteroid Ceres?”, offers captivating images of a bright light shining within one of the asteroid’s craters. At first, the photos revealed one source of light, but upon further review, two spots of lights shine in the spacecraft’s photos, which spanned a distance of 29,000 miles. Astronomers still aren’t sure what is the source of the light on the largest asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, but the spacecraft continues to plunge closer. Who knows what future pictures of Ceres will reveal?
Plait’s last article I’ll point to—“Kepler-4332b: A Doomed Planet Orbiting a Doomed Star”—offers some stunning insight into the long-term physical transformation of starts and planets. While Kepler-432b is much bigger than Jupiter, it is “about 1.1 times as wide,” Plait says, and is “about as dense as Earth.” This planet orbits a red giant, which Plait explains as “A start that is starting to die.” As the red giant grows bigger, its temperature drops; eventually, Plait asserts, the sun will begin to take over Kepler-432b, “where it will plunge deeper and deeper, until it evaporates completely.”
As the red giant continues to spin and lose heat, “it will fling off its outlet layers,” Plait says, “exposing the hot core at its center.” Ultraviolet light emits from the dense, ultra-hot core, rendering colorful folds of twisting and spiraling gas.
Now call to call to mind the most recent, cutting-edge scientific discoveries about the physical nature of our universe. Our Earth is no more special than Kepler-432b; our planet will face a similar fate, and so will our sun. But this fact is no reason to be sad, as all celestial bodies must dissolve, whether sucked into suns, or black holes, or otherwise.
The world, or rather the universe, is a crazy place. Keep these things in mind every once and a while—maybe during a stressful week of classes, or the night before a big interview. Humanity has its own, more local problems to worry about, but remember: we’re nothing more than the smallest blip in the universe. Our sense of time is nothing compared to the age of the universe.