No Beginning No End

Spiral Galaxy M100 hubblesite.org

Beginning with a three-week stay in the local hospital, this summer, despite maddeningly perfect weather, has been horrible. Sparing the details for another day, suffice to say I have embraced the suck and up is the only direction that remains.

While being buffeted by the winds of ick, drama and heartache, a Tweet came over the Twitterbox a week and a half ago that buoyed me in a surprising weightless way. One of my science-centric Twitter pals put up a link to an article about a theory gaining traction in the astrophysics world--did you know I moonlight as an astrophysicist? No?--that describes the Universe as never having a beginning. This mathematical--I'm assuming it's mathematical, probably some other stuff, too--theory says the Universe has always been here.

Now, I don't know about you, but that little piece of information changes everything. Always is a long time, like forever, right? Considering that the Universe has always been here takes some pressure off. I suspect that I'm not going to articulate this the way I would like. Nevertheless, it seems the subatomic particles that make up everything were always here and by some logic will always be here.

Maybe love, forgiveness and beauty are immeasurable representations of the immeasurability of the universe. Maybe the Classical beginning-middle-and-end manner of seeing everything from careers to relationships to lives to screenplays is handy, but not essential to the cosmos. Maybe the fact that my refrigerator is full and it becomes increasingly challenging to see the back of it really doesn't matter in this scheme of things.

Anyway, if you want to read more about this theory--not such a new one it turns out--head to the Technology Review Blog over at MIT. Be sure to read the comments--those that you can understand--too.

A New Old Star

No, this is not another Tom Petty post, though I am always up for that. It has nothing to do with Maine that I know of, and is only news to those who care about the big picture. The biggest picture.

This is about a real star, actually the death of a really old star, the oldest star ever seen. By seen, of course, I mean felt or sensed by a NASA satellite. This object, according to Harvard astrophysicist Edo Berger, is 13 billion light years away and was born moments, astronomically speaking, after the Big Bang. The Big Bang is estimated to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago, so this star's death throes, gamma waves--like the rings 'round a pebble thrown into a still pond--have traveled through the majority of the known universe until rolling over a Gemini observatory last week.

From the SpaceRef.com article, Berger said, "I have been chasing gamma-ray bursts for a decade, trying to find such a spectacular event. We now have the first direct proof that the young universe was teeming with exploding stars and newly-born black holes only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang."

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets, driven by processes not fully understood, punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short- lived afterglows in other wavelengths.

So last week we saw some ancient afterglow. That's getting to be all some of us can count on.

[H/T to Stan who clued me in to the obvious difference between light years and years. D'oh!]