Behold, the dazzling heart of the Centaurus A Galaxy 10 million light years away with its active supermassive central black hole that tips the scale at 1 billion solar masses -- compared to our Milky Way's "puny" and quiet supermassive central black hole Sagittarius A*, which comes it at "just" several million solar masses.#######
Yes, I've posted this too before on my Original Arcturus blog.
It's the opening of Second Genesis by Donald Moffitt, the sequel to his other 1986 book Genesis Quest. It sets the scene of how recreated humans are traveling in one of the branches of the hundreds of kilometers long and wide Dyson Tree named Yggdrasil.
Yggdrasil was attached to a huge Bussard ramjet (fusion drive) and was moving at extreme relativistic velocities (incredibly high gamma factor) across the 36 million light year* intergalactic gulf between its starting point, the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy, and its destination, the Milky Way Galaxy, in order to return to Earth to see what became of Original Man tens of millions of years earlier.The whole premise is quite absurd yet wonderful to read.
*The actual distance is uncertain -- perhaps as "little" as 23 million light years.
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Excerpt (I've added some extra paragraph breaks):
"The tree named Yggdrasil plunged toward the heart of the Galaxy at very nearly the speed of light, safe within a cone of shadow from a sleet of radiation that otherwise would have charred it to ash in microseconds.
It still clutched the remains of a comet in its roots, so water not yet a problem. But light and gravity were strangely wrong, interfering with its tropisms.Yggdrasil was a very confused tree.
Ahead, always, was a funnel of dancing sparks. Behind was a terribly bright light. Yggdrasil's senses told it that it was in the terrifying grip of a one-g gravitational field that was tugging it toward the unnatural sun.
It had been trying for twenty years to escape. But when it tried to turn the reflective surfaces of its leaves toward the perpendicular, something always frustrated it.Yet, wonder of wonders, Yggdrasil never fell. An equal and opposite force applied to a small region of its central trunk prevented that. Yggdrasil knew in its vegetable fashion that a girdle of foreign substance encircled its waist, but its senses were not adequate to tell it about the tether and the gargantuan turnbuckle that anchored the girdle.
A strange thing had happened to the stars as well. They swarmed around the tree in rainbow hoops of color -- violet, then blues, greens, and yellows ahead; orange and progressively darker reds behind. Both ahead and behind, blind disks had blossomed as the stars marched in both directions through the spectrum and disappeared. The rearward spot was larger. Over the years it had kept expanding and compressing the rainbow hoops and pushing them forward until now they circled the coruscating funnel of sparks like concentric halos.
Scores of times Yggdrasil had tried to pick a yellow target star, only to have it change colors and vanish from the Universe.Only the odd pursuing sun had not dopplered through the spectrum.
It remained fixed in color and distance, seeming to grow ever brighter against the expanding dark region behind it.
Jupiter: "King of the Planets"#######
Saturn: "Lord of the Rings"#######
Fretting, Yggdrasil tried to concentrate on growing one of its branches. Its crown -- since it had been prevented from spinning -- was no longer perfectly symmetrical, and this was a branch that needed to catch up. Fortunately, the direction of the tug of gravity was always a guide. Growth, Yggdrasil knew in its simple wisdom, was supposed to be perpendicular.
There was commensal life in one of the cavities of the errant branch, but it was too insignificant to be noticed. Yggdrasil ignored it. The only verities were light, gravitation, and water."Speaking of Neptune (above image), it's always been my favorite planet after Earth, if only because I was born in Neptune, New Jersey and it's "water blue" appearance.
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The largest of the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO's), including "dwarf planet" Pluto.#######
Schematic diagram showing the paths of Voyager I and II with Voyager I having gone through the termination shock initially in 2005 and into the heliosheath, though the position of it undulates with the solar wind.Voyager I is still a long way from the bow shock, the boundary where the interstellar medium (either on the forward or rear ward side of the Solar System's motion with respect to the galaxy) becomes subsonic and the effects of the solar wind essentially vanish -- and thus our Solar System finally ends. More information here.
Speaking of termination shocks, I fear my own from my job.
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Diagram of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud of frozen comet nuclei. The Oort Cloud extends a third of the way to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.24 light years away and may be loosely gravitationally bound to the binary Alpha Centauri system in a trinary system. The Oort Cloud extends well past the bow shock.#######
OK, that's all for now. I keep dreading something terrible will happen to me. If nothing else, that's just how my mind works.
Yours truly at the Fresco pizza / snack bar place in the sunken Watergate Shops promenade area, Washington, D.C., 6:10PM, Nov. 8, 2010. Tonight, I took one of my after-work jaunts over to Foggy Bottom and thence to the Watergate Safeway -- stopping first at Fresco -- before walking back home to the life-force enervating D.C. gayborhood.
My next planned update will be later this week.
--Arcturus
