The Horsehead Nebula is some 1500 light years away, and is instantly recognisable.
It is a nursery for new stars, and as such, contains many unusual features including unknown molecules - one recently discovered was so alien that it cannot exist in a stable form on Earth (although scientists at the University of Cologne did manage to create a sample that was stable for a few seconds, proving that the theoretical particle could exist).
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| Horsehead Nebula NASA.gov |
Specifically the IRAM telescope in the Sierra Nevada.
They have isolated the wavelength on which this molecule transmits (89.957 gigahertz).
They can even tell you what it smells like - it is in the benzene family...
On that note, there was a news piece a few years ago where they announced the smell of space.
Apparently it's a mixture of seared steak and hot chrome.
Space smells like a cosmic motorbike parked up at a roadside barbeque.
In other news, a recent burst of gamma rays from distant galaxy PKS 1441+25 took scientists by surprise.
Because these powerful gamma rays had been travelling in a straight line for 7.6 billion years, which is half the age of the known universe.
Approximately.
These gamma rays set out from a supermassive black hole at the centre of PKS 1441+25 some 7.6 billion years ago, and have travelled in a straight line, uninterrupted by cosmic debris or radiation (I wish my wi-fi was that good) through untold events and timelines (including the creation of our world , 2 billion years into the journey) , kept travelling forward through time and space ( meanwhile, we had five mass extinctions and an ice age leading to the rise of mammals and humans ) and eventually reached our solar system on the outer edge of the milky way, travelled past the Oort cloud and Pluto and Neptune and Uranus and Saturn and Jupiter and Mars and our moon and finally reached our humble planet where the signals were picked up by Fermi and an array of radio telescopes that only started operation 3 years ago - how's that for timing ?
Specifically, the signals arrived in April 2015.
Quite a catch for a set of data from high energy particles ejected from a black hole 7.6 billion light years away...
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| Artists impression of Fermi |
This is where my rudimentary understanding of science breaks down.
Now that these incredibly powerful particles have been interrupted by noting them, is their journey at an end?
Or do they continue to travel as invisible particles through the Earth and onwards?
Do they end up in the furnace of our sun, their energy transmuted by alchemy into another form ?
Are we into quantum territory, where their observation means that they cease to be gamma rays at all ?
And why all the questions ?
The science behind all this leaves me deeply impressed, but the clincher for many, in this Age of Acronyms, is surely that the Earth based telescopes which detected the particles , are known as the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cerenkov telescopes , or MAGIC .
A name to conjure with,..
On that note, I shall take my leave, and bid you
A Very Merry Festive Holidays to All !
