Norwegian, 22, Takes World Chess Title
Daily Archives: November 22, 2013
Laying in Supplies
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Ovid got some attention this morning. Jupiter’s pretty mad at Lycaon. Mad enough to destroy all of humankind. There’s a flood coming.
Missing in the afternoon. Adding description, sprucing up the defenses of Hilgo, the Winter Realm’s port city on the Winter Sea and describing the terrain advantages in general for the Winter Realm.
Yesterday’s push left me dry today. Not as on, but then yesterday was an exception. The normal is plug alone, plug along, plug along. Like today. No magic, just work. Now, the work was fun. Yes. But not inspired. Most often not inspired.
Kate’s been to the library for audio books. Nebraska is interesting depending on the author you choose. I’ve been laying in supplies and will make a final sally forth tomorrow to Festival for the last batch. It’s odd, but being without a car for a week doesn’t daunt me at all. My work is here and there’s plenty of room around to get outside. With the food delivery service from Byerly’s I might be able to last quite a time. As long as there are no doggie or human emergencies. I have plans in place for those if they occur.
It will be like being a hermit in my own home. A hermit with three dogs, a computer and an HD TV.
A Long When Ago
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
A gamma burst within 3.7 billion light years of home. Close, in astronomy’s scale of distance. That is, it was not so far away that the distance the light traveled to get here puts it back in the time of the early universe, the formation phase. Hard to grasp sometimes, that astronomy measures time in the metric of distance, but 3.7 billion light years is not only a long ways away, it’s also a very long when ago.
Said another way, the light of this massive gamma burst traveled 3.7 billion years to get here. How do we know? Because light, the fastest thing in the universe, takes a year to travel a certain distance and we know what that distance is. It so happens that because we take a measure of time and out of it create a measure of distance that we can also know the when.
In case you were wondering: 186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year
OK, I thought. But how do we know how many light years away something is? I looked it up and the method for things further than 3.6 light years away is called the standard candle method. Here’s a brief paragraph to describe how it’s used, then a graphic that I found helpful.
“One example of a standard candle is a type Ia supernova. Astronomers have reason to believe that the peak light output from such a supernova is always approximately equivalent to an absolute blue sensitive magnitude of -19.6. Thus, if we observe a type Ia supernova in a distant galaxy and measure the peak light output, we can use the inverse square law to infer its distance and therefore the distance of its parent galaxy.” from this website.
this graphic is from the hyperphysics website: