So much light

4, yes. And here?

Each speck a galaxy, some nearly as old as the universe, hundreds of billions of them, all looking something like

Each galaxy containing billions of stars, and each star powered by fusion - the collision of atoms which produces just about everything.

Some of this we call light, and bless it with sight, and are defined by it.

There has been an error

An error of some sort was required to create everything you see. For, there was matter and antimatter, and theoretically these two should cancel each other out, and yet they do not. By like 0.000001% for reference. But that 0.000001% was enough to create our entire Universe. Every star, every galaxy, every black hole, the sum remainder of an unfinished math set.

Imperfection is the source of Creation.

This being true, should we judge those who make mistakes? Or systems that crash?

Like this digital billboard with a Windows error in the fog?

Bow Shock

I like to think of stars as the basic building block of the Universe. Not sure if this is an accepted opinion, but I think it works. Everything revolves around stars - planetary systems like ours, and all life here on Earth and maybe on the 1000+ exoplanets discovered to date (there's billions more - current consensus is just about every star has planets).

Here, you see a star in its larger environment - ginormous gas clouds. Stars are born from these clouds, they shape and influence these clouds, and their death creates new clouds. Above you see a star affecting a larger gas cloud environment, creating a bow shock in the clouds - just like a boat creates a bow shock in water, or a wind turbine creates a bow shock in the air, stars are shaping the larger environments in which they find themselves. Here's another example.

Anywhere there are stars and gas clouds, you'll see bow shocks.

We exist in a sea of gas - we come from this gas. Gas!

These clouds are primarily hydrogen, but also contain everything that would make up a star and its planets - iron, silver, gold, carbon, everything.

The Motion

Click for big, as always.

Hey! Motion is a funny thing - everything is in motion. EVERYTHING! Whether you're sleeping or sitting or even dead, you're in motion. The Earth spins, the Earth rotates around the Sun, the Sun rotates around the galactic center, the Milky Way galaxy rotates around a shared gravitational spot with Andromeda, the Local Group rotates around a larger cluster of galaxies, and so on. So on... forever! And of course it goes down as well, as electrons rotate around nuclei, and quarks rotate around each other, and it's true: Reality is motion. There is not one thing standing still - it's literally impossible, in the literal sense.

Above, a truer view of our Solar System - as the planets rotate around the Sun, the Sun is speeding along on the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way, a backwater place far from the bustling galaxy core.

Also, I just drove across America in a huge truck towing a 67 Mustang. What a country! Always in motion!

Shells

Let me drop some more perspective on you. Here's our old friend, the Oort Cloud. Picture billions upon billions of icy little comets tumbling around in a vast sphere, such that our entire solar system is enshrouded in a cloud of ice. A shell, like the electron shell.

It's big - extending almost a light year in all directions from the Sun. And then as you see, far closer in, is another sphere, or shell, of icy bodies, but also rocky bodies too - like Pluto. The Kuiper Belt, another shell - also like the electron shell.

So again picture this from far away in space, looking towards the Sun. First a giant cloud of white ice, floating lazily in a vast sphere. And another sphere of ice and rock far within that, and then tucked inside that shell are planets, and a star.

Every star with planets probably has something similar. And so now look up into the dark sky and picture every star you see as a white egg of ice shells, within beats the bright nucleus of a galactic atom. Together these atoms join with vast clouds of gas to create galaxies, and galaxies join other galaxies strung along in necklaces of dark matter, grouping in vast clouds of millions of galaxies, stretching.... forever?

Is a shell forever?

Venus and Luna

Another redshirt shot of Venus and The Pleiades, with a very special guest "Ring around the Moon (w/ cloud)"! Not a shop in any way, just some funky clouds making it all spectral and astral n' stuff. Word. Click for big. Bonus ring pic:

I'm ashamed to admit I don't have a big enough lens to capture phenomena like Ye Olde Moon Ring in their entirety. This was the best I could do to fit it all in one pic - no dice. It was a huge ring around the Moon, and striking to behold, especially with the bright planets to the lower right. The night sky is amazing when you can finally see it, free of interference.

The source of myth in fact - consider, even ancient pre-humans understood the movement of stars and planets. They understood this "cage" we live in - with the stars far, far away, disappearing during the day when a giant fireball awakened. Which some figured out, way, way back when, was just another star, like all the lights of night. That will blow even an Erectus mind.

Also too: As I've said before, we need to call our moon a name, not "The Moon". The word "moon" refers to any natural satellite in orbit around a planet. Our moon is but one of hundreds (millions really when you consider Saturn's rings are made up of pieces of ice and each piece is technically a moon) of moons in our Solar System, and one of hundreds of billions in our galaxy, and mayhaps of trillions across the Universe. As you see, referring to the awesome object orbiting Earth as "The Moon" is no descriptor anymore.

I propose Luna, which is a cheat, sure, but Latin is classy. I am open to suggestions, though of course I will have no role whatsoever in naming our moon. Thank you for your support.

The Same Shape

A fire vortex. Wicked metal. And it is the vortex that repeats at all levels of our reality, from the very small to the large beyond comprehension. It is one of the, if not the, default shapes of reality. Gravity follows the vortex, and in it creates almost everything, via stars, and galaxies of stars. Here, heat rising rapidly in cooler surrounding air creates a vortex of fire whirling up the compressed space, as with all things: Imbalances creates motions, motions bring change.

The spiral is the symbol of the vortex, and should be our symbol of understanding.

Down is Up (Up is Down)

 

Look deeply into the ever turning gyre, and soon enough you can't tell if you're going down or up. And so is the very nature of reality - down, up, fast, slow, these are all relative terms. In fact, this is part of Einstein's theories of relativity, which states (in part) that all motion, all direction, is always relative to the observer. There is no other way to define it. Up is up to you, up could be something different to someone else from a different perspective. Another example - right now, every human on this Earth is flying through space at many thousands of miles per hour. Does it seem that way to you? No, because we are so small relative to the size of the Earth that we don't notice the spinning and the hurtling. It's much bigger than us.

And so with that, here's an interpretive graph of a black hole:

In 3 dimensional space (4 dimensional really, but lets not overly complicate things), the black hole sits at the center of a sphere, and towards its two poles matter and energy falls. Now, what happens at this center - the Singularity which is the black hole - no one has any idea what happens. It's all educated guesses and no one feels confident about any of them. I am confident, however, that the black hole is key to our Universe and understanding it will allow us to understand so very much more. Note - I spend a lot of time thinking about black holes, like an itch I can't stop scratching, because something is big there. Something important. How can all that matter and energy get compressed to... nothing? Something's missing. Finding it will unlock the next game level.

I'm not the only one, of course, spending a lot of time thinking about black holes. Cosmology in large part is now focused on them, since, again just for an example, a massive black hole sits at the center of every galaxy, leading one to wonder - is the black hole necessary for galaxies? Are galaxies in fact nothing but the environments created by black holes? It's possible! Black holes could be very, very tiny too - microscopic black holes might exist all around us, popping into existence and popping back out, the quantum fizz in our effervescent existence. As with all things in this reality, the big is reflected in the small, the small in the big, and scientists are finding that water can be used to simulate many of the effects of black holes. Above, the ocean vortex. Imagine another vortex meeting this one from the bottom of the sea, and you have a black hole effect.  Many things can be learned by these simulations, one of which is - look at all the water that avoids the vortex (black hole)! Most of it. Ergo, black holes are no single minded monsters of destruction, but rather they are fundamental to our Universe. Take a look at a cross section:

Only a small percentage of the matter and energy drawn towards a black hole actually goes into the black hole. The rest is spun around, heated up, and thus causes rotation on large scales (i.e. galaxies spinning) and create stars upon stars upon stars - the first star, perhaps, was birthed by a black hole.

So, shed any old notions you might have had about big bad evil black holes. They are, in fact (theory!), the very engines of our Creation, and the greatest mystery that exists today. 

Solve the Singularity!

As big (small) as it gets

This is a survey of galaxies spanning billions and billions of light years. There's a lot of them. You can see strands and groupings of galaxies in filament like structures - the dark band across the center is our own galaxy's light blotted out, since it's so bright.

This is our Universe, and our entire galaxy is but a tiny dot in a great matrix of galaxies. But these galaxies and great strands of galaxies had a precursor, which was a mere ripple in the energy of the Big Bang. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation:

This is two sides of the same image. The red represents slightly warmer, and the blue represents slightly cooler, but these colors are arbitrary. What this actual image shows is the difference in radiation frequency soon after the Big Bang, and it was the colder areas that formed the first galaxies of massive clouds of hydrogen, and soon after the first stars, which led to the others and ultimately our existence. This difference in frequency led to the pattern of galaxies shown above.

What will really twist your mind is this image of the CMBR is from when the entire Universe was damn small. And if you extrapolate back to when the entire Universe was smaller still, it becomes microscopic, atomic, subatomic, smaller than an electron. And thus this difference in frequency stems from the start when the whole of our reality was smaller than a Quark.

We come from this subatomic moment - the very parts that make us up were there. We are the Universe, man, and are as big and as small as we want to see it.

Not Trek, Nor Solo

Ah, sweet, foreign,knockoff. Is there no end to the laughs you bring?

Let me answer that for you: No, there is not. Not if you still have a spark of life.

Also, Galaxy 666 sounds awesome. I bet it's rockin'.