More from the deep dark suburbs of the universe…
A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. The gravity of the cluster’s trillion stars � plus dark matter � acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide “lens” in space. This “gravitational lens” bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it. Some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away (redshift value 6).
Though gravitational lensing has been studied previously by Hubble and ground-based telescopes, this phenomenon has never been seen before in such detail. The ACS picture reveals 10 times more arcs than would be seen by a ground-based telescope. The ACS is 5 times more sensitive and provides pictures that are twice as sharp as the previous work-horse Hubble cameras. So it can see the very faintest arcs with greater clarity. The picture presents an immense jigsaw puzzle for Hubble astronomers to spend months untangling. Interspersed with the foreground cluster are thousands of galaxies, which are lensed images of the galaxies in the background universe. Detailed analysis of the images promises to shed light on galaxy evolution, the curvature of space, and the mystery of dark matter. The picture is an exquisite demonstration of Albert Einstein’s prediction that gravity warps space and distorts beams of light.
From hubblesite.org
A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of ‘painting with light’. Astronomers use the separated colours produced by oxygen and hydrogen to investigate star-forming processes in the nebula NGC 2080. The colours explain much about the nature of such nebulae.
–from the European Space Agency
Ideas, on CBC Radio is running a five part series on Simone Weil. It features one episode on her life and then four on her political and mystical thought.
Weil was a French Jew who became a Christian mystic and died in 1943. She was an anarchist, and her writings were championed by the likes of Andre Gide, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, George Grant and Czeslaw Milosz. She wrote on affliction, suffering, sanctity, theology and philospophy. She identified with the working class, and styled herself as a slave.
On sanctity she wrote:
Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent� . A new type of sanctity � is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny� . More genius is needed [to invent it] than was needed by Archimedes to invent mechanics and physics. A new saintliness is a still more marvellous invention.
Many people argued for her sainthood after she died, but she died having never been baptized and so this was impossible. Not everyone held this opinion of her however, and some commentators have questioned the portryal of her as a saint
She exhibited a few blemishes but perhaps the most damning was a streak of anti-Semitism that resulted in her thinking being regarded paradoxically by some writers. For instance in this great biographical sketch in New Criterion, Jillian Becker writes:
Let us consider this. Here was a well-provided-for, well-educated young woman who freely chose to regard herself as a slave and to starve herself to death while war raged, hungry children helplessly wasted away in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto, the living skeletons of actual slaves dropped into the dust at Bergen-Belsen, and human bodies were consumed night and day in the ovens of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The young woman in question was a thinker and writer respected even in her own time by intellectuals and leaders of opinion, but she said nothing about these atrocities. She let herself die in 1943 when millions of her fellow Jews were being murdered in the name of the �final solution of the Jewish question,� and she who claimed to feel a deep sympathy with the afflicted and even a longing to bear their suffering for them protested only against being classed as one of them. If Fiedler is right that Simone Weil epitomizes the moral ideals of our time, then we are morally adrift in an era of darkness.
More on Simone Weil later.
The completion of satellite missions is something that is marked like the death of an old friend among space techs.
The Galileo probe, which has travelled around Jupiter for more than ten years and contributed huge amounts of knowledge about the planet is about to be sent plunging into Jupiter’s atmosphere.
THis itself isn’t news perhaps, but what really caught my eye about this story was the consideration and planning that went into HOW to destroy Galileo. As quoted in
this article, NASA has decided to burn up Galileo to protect life that may exist on one of it’s moons:
The three-ton spacecraft is sailing through the outbound leg of its 35th and final orbit of Jupiter. It will crash into Jupiter on Sept. 21, a deliberate plunge into the dark side of the planet — out of view from Earth — at 108,000 mph.
The robotic suicide is designed to eliminate any chance that a hardy microbe, possibly alive in the radiation-shielded bowels of the spacecraft, could contaminate one of Jupiter’s moons, where subsurface oceans may harbor life.
This is such a generous act, full of reverence for life that may not even exist. It is an act that is the golden rule embodied, bringing to mind, as is happening in outer space, the Star Trek Prime Directive:
As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes the introduction of superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation.
Am I alone in thinking that this is the first human action in outer space that conforms consciously to this directive?