I was sat on the London tube this morning. My elbows were tucked in over my kneecaps and my body was somewhat contorted in its stature, for I was crammed between two people who, I mused to myself, represented two modern extremes. To my left was a plump oderous middle-aged women, who gripped a romance novel in her glutinous palms, no-doubt envisioning her own tardy prince charming, who was to whisk her away in his impressively expensive but adequately dampened orange mazda, but was just taking his sweet time; and to my right slouched a teenager, the sort that looked purposely at odds with his surroundings, his jeans several sizes too large, his face perpetually grimacing as if stonecast, and an incomprehensible whirr of sound emanating outward from his ceremonially encased eardrums. The two never exchanged glances, mainly accounting to the fact that I was acting as a barrier between them, but if they were to, the mutual disdain would have proven comical to behold, I chuckled inwardly.
Yet these are not the extremes to which the title of my post refers. My body may have been wedged awkwardly between the two culturally contrasting blobs of meat, bouncing up and down in unison, but my mind was somewhere else entirely! It had been vicerously plied from my eyesockets and rudely yanked through the pages of the magazine that I was reading into the the vast expanse of space. Literally, the topic of which I had been reading had been to do with outer space, and presented me squarely with images of such monumental scale that the quotidian around me, not just the teenage boy and woman, but my own life trials had been temporarily swept into oblivion. What a refreshing feeling!
I have recently taken it upon myself, on account of no longer being in institutionalised education, to keep up with current economic, political, and scientific affairs through a select few trusted publications; namely the Economist, New Scientist, and Scientistific American. The article that I was reading, in New Scientist (5 March 2011 ed.), discussed the recognised scales of physics, such as size, heat, distance, etc. in relation to astral bodies and presented the current extremes of our knowledge regarding them.
For example under the subtitle ‘what’s hot… and what’s not’ I found out that the temperature of the surface of our sun is approximately 5800 kelvin!
Our Sun
So that is hot right? Considering that the temperature of the average human body is about 310 kelvin…
No.
HD62166, another much bigger star, measures up to 200,000 kelvin! But even that is mere peanuts on the universal scale. The centre of super giant stars is predicted to be between 1-6 billion kelvin, and a supernova recently viewed in 1987 was calculated to have produced temperatures of about 200 billion kelvin. Not only that, but the birth of a black hole or collapse of a neutron star is estimated at 10,000,000,000,000 kelvin. Scientists go as far as to say that the highest temperature current mathematical physics can handle is 10 with 32 naughts after it.
Another interesting set of information that got my brain whirring was under the caption ‘Burning bright’, which summarised the brightest sources of light in the universe. Apparently our sun is already above average for a star at about 4 with 26 naughts after it watts, but there are much much more luminous bodies and so physicists use the brightness of our sun as a unit in and of itself. A kind of luminosity index for stars. Here are some increasingly astounding examples mentioned:
Epsilon Orionis (the middle of Orion’s belt, his buckle?) = 400,000 x our sun
Eta Carinae = 5,000,000 x our sun
R136a1 (the current record holder for solar brightness) = 9,000,000 x our sun
Supernova SN 2005ap = a stellar explosion peaking at 100 billion x our sun
Gamma ray bursts = 10 with 18 naughts after it x our sun
And finally and particularly mind-boggling in magnitude is the amount of light released by quasars, in which a massive black hole feeds on stars and gas. As the material spirals inwards it can shine with the light of…
thirty trillion x our sun!
A Quasar
The third part of the article which really captured my imagination was called ‘Space balls’ and was about the most spherical objects in the universe. Planets rank pretty highly, as spheroidal shapes pulled inward by the force of their own gravity, and the Earths largest bumps and wrinkles, including Everest and the Mariana trench, only represent 0.2% of the planet’s radius. But Earth is positively craggy when compared to Neutron stars. With 200 billion times more gravity than Earth a Neutron Star’s Mount Everest would be no more than 5 millimetres high, less than one part in a million of the stellar radius.
Theoretically the nearest thing in nature to perfect roundness could be the event horizon of a black hole (the point at which light can no longer escape).
A Neutron Star
Last but not least (at least spacially), the emptiest part of space is a massive gap in observable space that is noticeable bigger than any other intergalactic gap. It is approximately one billion light years across! Some physicists suggest that it could be a blemish left by an ancient encounter with another universe!
It’s important to speculate on the wonder of the universe every so often because it helps restore a healthy amount of perspective to life and with that comes humility. Too often I get caught up in my own little world, obssessing over my vices and desires. Humanity as a whole is a narrow-minded species. It is not our fault, of course, we are just animals after all with all the dependencies, responsibilities, and flaws that that entails. Down here at our scale, life is a constant struggle for survival. Still, it’s nice to know that we can flick through a magazine in the midst of it and instantly, if only momentarily, have the veil lifted, and be reminded of the incredible, incredible truth of existence.
This final link will blow your mind:
Good Night.
x
庵の唸り 
OOOHHH, SCIENCE.