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1/05/2014

Starfields - and Things I Wonder About.


Have you ever looked a one of those Hubble photos of intense starfields?  Especially ones that are pointed toward Sagittarius?  Or the ESO Zoomable Galaxy Image?

I'm not going to do links - if you want to see them, you can Google them and find the links you need.

The thing is, if you look at the photos long enough, just look at and into them long enough, you'll begin to see patterns.  At first, you might not believe what you're seeing.  Or you may wonder what it is that could possibly cause what you THINK you might be seeing.  But then you look longer and you KNOW what you're seeing, you just wonder what might cause stars to form in lines.

Sometimes the lines are short.  Little curves of stars, 3 or 4 at a time.  As you stare longer, knowing now what you're looking for, you see longer lines, or broken lines - lines that stop and then pick up a little farther along.

You might wonder, at first, if these are lines of force, or ripples in the Galactic Magnetic Field which caused the stars to form where they did.  But then you realize you're never heard any discussion, anywhere, about the way that stars line up in curves that remind you of the edges of bubbles.

They ARE bubbles.  The stars formed along the leading edges of the shock waves generated by exploding stars.  Shock waves that blew outward like soap bubbles and sometimes crashed into clouds of gas that were sitting there, waiting for the push that would cause them to spring to life.

Those stars, formed along those lines, are the true children of THIS Galaxy - the stars that came here as the Milky Way ate up other, smaller galaxies, had their orderly lines disturbed and distorted by the process of being adopted here. 

So look at the pictures of star fields and see the lines. 

See the stars that are, in reality, our cousins - for we are made of the same stuff. 

Someday, mankind will learn to see itself as the citizen of Earth and then, perhaps, as the child of the Galaxy.  Hopefully. by then we will have learned to play nice with others.

Ndinombethe, Ubuntu.

5 comments:

Marianne said...

Hope springs eternal. Except today. Today is freaking miserable. Brrrr.

Neil said...

Liked this very much. When I went to NZ last year was the first time I think I actually SAW the stars in the sky without all the light pollution we have here.

Unknown said...

When I look up to the stars in the sky at night I do see patterns. I also see God. His handiwork is amazing.

Tara R. said...

I do love the way your mind works. I wish I knew more about the constellations, and our place in this universe.

Big Mark 243 said...

It is amazing to think that anything so awesome could have been designed by a conscious mind... the universe is beyond overwhelming and maybe in another 5000 years we will have reached the point where we are indeed deserving to be citzens of the universe...