CHRISTMAS AND COSMOLOGY: A PECULIAR TAKE ON CHRISTMAS
As we age, most people tend to lose a sense of wonder and mystery. This is a damn shame, in my view, because the wonder and mystery of Life just increases with each passing day. Tis but the 4th day of Christmas so this peculiar take on Christmas so I have 8 days left to figure out how to explain this one. We'll start with a whiff of the idea. Next will be some fun facts about the earth and this peculiar structure called 'The Great Attractor'. If you proceed that far into the depths of space, the meaning of Christmas awaits.
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"CREATION IS ONGOING" ----LAKOTA
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The meaning of Christmas surpasses our abilities to get it. However, just a whiff of a sense of the spirit of Christmas is quite enough to get very intoxicated. At the moment, I don't feel much about Christmas; it's just another day as far as I'm concerned. Maybe, I'll catch a whiff of a whiff this year. I'm not holding my breath. I've experienced it in the past. Connecting Christmas to Cosmology many years back caused me to tremble in awe. One cool thing about the meaning of Christmas is that 'it' isn't really affected by whether we have it or if we 'believe' in it. Like the sun and the moon, and the stars-some things just are regardless of our beliefs. Where did we ever get the bizarre notion the Uni-verse gives a damn about what we think ?
The Universe is around 14-15 billion years old. The earth is reckoned to be 4.5 billion years old. About 2 million years ago, the branch leading to us just up and appeared. So, homo sapiens sapiens is thought to have appeared 40 thousand years ago. Some people say we all share the same great-great-great.....................grandmother named Lucy. Scientists bicker about where human beings began their journey. Everybody agrees we have been marching a long time; 40 thousand years sounds like a "Long Walk" to me. Historians tell us of the 'Axial Age' that started about 600 years B.C. It seems Lao Tzu, the Buddha, and a sizable number of exceptionally bright people all lived at about the same time.
A little more than 2 thousand years ago, an infant boy named Jesus was born----though not anywhere near December. Apparently, there was some kind of unusual alignment of planets or something some star constellation that got called the "Star of Bethlehem" happening at the time. Wise men, shephards, and other stargazers were quite sure something unique appeared in the heavens.
Sometime in the past 2 million years--maybe 40 thousand--something unprecedented happened. Consciousness emerged from matter. Some call such events instances of 'punctuated equilibria'. Spirit emerged from matter. Some suggest that the earth had been groaning with birth pains for 4.5 billion years waiting for this moment of moments to occur. The emergence of consciousness was followed by an emergence of a particular type of consciousness we associate mostly with human beings. It took a very long time for Creation to get around to this chapter in the story.
It's said that Creation believes she is sacred and ongoing.......headed somewhere. If this is true, it makes sense there would be eras and events that would testify to Creation's insistence she is sacred. Christmas marks the appearance of something new and unprecedented in the world. A Child was born (spirit emerged from matter ?). This Child like every Child had a birthright, some mission to fulfill. Rather than start wars over who/what Jesus of Nazareth (what good can come from Nazareth anyhow) was or wasn't, let's just agree he was unusual----some would say unique and unprecedented.
Creation took 15 billion years to get around to his birth. His birth is symbolic of the birth of every Child. It took Mother Earth 4.5 billion years to 'birth' human beings. Human beings waited 40 thousand years for some sign of where we fit into Creation. That is a long time.
"O Holy Night....O Night Divine"...............what an understatement !
I fell to my knees when my children were born....."those nights Divine" !
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"We are all one child, spinning in infinity, on Mother Earth, being pulled at an unimaginable speed toward the Great Attractor"
--Grumpy Bear (the Great Attractor is as real as the Sun)
"Some people say the sky is just the sky. I say-'Why deny the Obvious Child"
----Paul Simon
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Earth
Position Third from the Sun
Distance from Sun: 149,600,000 km
Earth Day: 24 hours
Earth Year: 365 Earth Days
Orbital Speed: 29.8 km/sec
Eccentricity of Orbit: 0.017
Satellites: 1
Diameter: 12,756 km
Mass: 5.976e24 kg
Major Atmospheric Gas: Nitrogen
* Earth is the fifth largest planet in the Solar System.
* The Earth is around 4.6 billion years old.
* Earth is the only presently known planet in the Solar System to support life. The earliest fossil evidence for life dates back 3.5 billion years ago.
* 71% of Earth's surface is covered in water.
* The Earth is the densest planet in the Solar System.
* The Earth travels at an orbital speed of 108,000 km (67,000 miles) an hour.
* The Earth has only one satellite, the Moon. The Moon is the second brightest object in the sky.
* The Earth's atmosphere is composed mainly of nitrogen (77%), oxygen (21%), argon (.93%), and carbon dioxide (0.03%).
* The surface features on Earth are extremely varied with vast oceans, tall mountains, rolling plains, canyons, swamps, and deserts. The tallest mountain on our planet, Mount Everest in the Himalayas, stands at an altitude of 8,872 m (29,108 ft). Located in Africa, the Sahara, the largest desert on Earth, spans over 500,000 sq km (2,123,000 sq miles) of land. The Grand Canyon, a canyon of multi covered rock terraces cut by the Colorado River, stretches over 350 km (217 miles) of land.
* 71% of the Earth's surface is coverered in water, which holds vast amounts of ocean life and maintains the temperature of the planet.
* Earth has an average surface temperature of 13 degrees C (55.4 degrees F). The planet would be much colder without greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, to trap outgoing thermal radiation. The greenhouse effect raises the planet's temperature 35 degrees C (95 degrees F).
* Earth is composed of three layers: a core, a mantle, and an outer crust. The core is composed of two parts: an inner core of solid iron and nickle (2,600 km in diamter), and an outer core made of molten iron and nickle (2,250 km thick). The mantle is partially molten liquid (2,900 km thick). The crust (8 to 40 km thick) is composed of over twenty plates that float on top of the hot mantle. The motion of these plates is called tectonic drift. Tectonic drift is responsible for seafloor spreading and continental drift.
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Great Attractor
Sol Station
Home | X-Objects | Stars | Habitability | Life |
2P2 Team, WFI,
MPG/ESO 2.2-m Telescope,
La Silla Observatory, ESO
Larger false-color image of the
ACO or Abell 3627 supercluster of
galaxies, which lies near the core
of the Great Attractor.
A huge volume of space that includes
the Milky Way and superclusters of
galaxies is flowing towards a largely
unseen mass called the Great Attractor
(more from APOD and ESO).
Region around the Mostly Unseen Mass
In the 1980s, a group of astronomers known as the "Seven Samurai" (David Burstein, Roger Davies, Alan Dressler, Sandra Faber, Donald Lynden-Bell, Roberto J. Terlevich, and Gary Wegner) found that galaxies are very unevenly distributed in space, with galactic superclusters separated by incredibly huge voids of visible ordinary matter. The Great Attractor is one such structure, a diffuse concentration of matter some 400 million light-years in size located around 250 million light-years (ly) away in the direction of the southern Constellation Centaurus, about seven degrees off the plane of the Milky Way -- at a redshift-distance of 4,350 kilometers (or around 2,700 miles) per second. It lies in the so-called Zone of Avoidance, where the dust and stars of the Milky Way's disk obscures as much as a quarter of the Earth's visible sky.
? © Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg and
Ofer Lahav, Scientific American
(October 1998): pp. 50-57
(Permission being sought)
The Great Attractor is located
in a region of the universe that
is obscured from observers in
the Solar System by the dust of
the Milky Way's disk (more).
The Great Attractor is apparently pulling in millions of galaxies in a region of the universe that includes the Milky Way, the surrounding Local Group of 15 to 16 nearby galaxies and larger Virgo Supercluster, and the nearby Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, at velocities of around 600 (in the Local Group) to thousands of kilometers (or miles) per second (Lynden-Bell et al, 1988; and Dressler et al, 1987). Based on the observed galactic velocities, the unseen mass inhabiting the voids between the galaxies and clusters of galaxies is estimated to total around 10 times more than the visible matter in this region of the universe and so must be composed of mostly dark matter. Calculations indicate that the Great Attractor has perhaps around 5.4 times 1016 Solar-masses. Galaxies located on the other side of the Great Attractor are also being pulled in its direction, so that they were being held back very slightly from expanding as fast as rest of the universe, by the gravitational pull of the Great Attractor (Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg, 2000). [More discussion of how the sheets, filaments, and stars of the early universe developed from quantum fluctuations and the gravitational condensation of dark and ordinary matter can be found in First Stars.]
© Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg and Ofer Lahav,
Scientific American (October 1998): pp. 50-57
(Permission being sought)
Millions of galaxies may be moving towards
the Great Attractor, including the Virgo and
the Hydra-Centaurus superclusters of
galaxies (more).
Core of the Great Attractor
The core of the Great Attractor lies within the so-called "Centaurus Wall" of galaxies. From the perspective of observers in the Solar System, this Great Wall-like structure is viewed edge-on (Woudt and Kraan-Korteweg, 2000). The intersection of the Centaurus Wall and the Great Attractor includes the Norma Cluster or Supercluster -- ACO 3627, Abell 3627, or A3627 (Woudt et al, 2000, 1999a, and 1999b). Indeed, the Milky Way, the Local Group, and the surrounding Virgo Supercluster, as well as the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster, appear to be part (or at least "appendages") of the sheet of ordinary and dark matter that forms the Centaurus Wall. [More discussion and color images of the Virgo Supercluster and the Centaurus Wall are available from Professor Anthony P. Fairall's lecture on "Large-Scale Structures in the Universe.")
© Anthony P. Fairall,
An Atlas of Nearby Large-scale
Structures, from Large-scale
Structures in the Universe
(Used with permission)
The core of the Great Attractor
("A3627" at left) lies within the
"Centaurus Wall" of galaxies
(more maps and discussion
on Large-scale Structures in
the Universe).
The Great Attractor's core region appears to be dominated by the Norma Supercluster, a highly obscured, nearby, and massive group of galaxies close to the plane of the Milky Way (Woudt et al, 1999a and 1999b; Kraan-Korteweg et al, 1996; and Patrick Alan Woudt, 1998 PhD thesis). In the absence of the obscuring effects of the Milky Way, the Norma Supercluster would have appeared as prominent as the well-known Coma Cluster or Supercluster, but nearer in redshift-space. Indeed, spectroscopic observations support the idea that the Norma Supercluster is the dominant component of a "Great Wall"-type of structure and is comparable in size, richness and mass similar to Coma in the northern part of the Great Wall (Woudt et al, 2000; and 1997). [The Norma Supercluster is also associated with a "Finger of God effect" in plots of galactic redshift velocities when viewed from the perspective of the Solar System.]
© Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg, Patrick Alan Woudt,
and Patricia A. Henning, 1997 (PASA, 14:1)
(Permission being sought)
The core of the Great Attractor appears to include
the Norma Supercluster of galaxies (more).
The overdensity of galaxies in the region of the Norma Supercluster was first detected in the 1980s. Although astronomers have since observed a large excess of galaxies with optical and infrared telescopes in this region, no dominant cluster or central peak has been identified. This strongly suggests that a significant fraction of the Great Attractor's overdensity could still be obscured by the Milky Way, possibly in another rich cluster of galaxies around the strong radio-source PKS1343-601 (Woudt and Kraan-Korteweg, 2000).
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"We are all one child, spinning in infinity, on Mother Earth, being pulled at an unimaginable speed toward the Great Attractor"
--Grumpy Bear (the Great Attractor is as real as the Sun)
"Some people say the sky is just the sky. I say-'Why deny the Obvious Child"
----Paul Simon
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