Beltane Wedding Moon
Ruth and I went to the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Saturday night for a program on black holes. Ruth had never been to a planetarium. The lights went down and the night sky appeared on the dome above us. The southern night sky. So, right away the wonder of the star machine. Then, the night sky over Boulder with the constellations. The astronomer talked about their correlation to the ancients who relied on them for agricultural purposes. It is reportedly spring. Somewhere.
Ruth watched and listened carefully. The short film on black holes was not easy, covering the birth of black holes, their peculiar physics and their role in the cosmos. After it was over, the astronomer walked us through some of the recent findings related to black holes, the most notable being the discovery of gravity waves at the LIGO observatory. The relation to black holes is that the gravity pulse detected at LIGO began in a black hole.
It’s been a while since I immersed myself in matters astronomical. My fine grained understanding of the evening was not great. The hey now moment came at the end when the astronomer pulled the dome’s display further and further out until the entire Sloan Survey covered only the center of the dome.
The rest of the dome then represented the edge of the knowable universe. Out there the astronomer showed what he called the light wall, a here cooler, there warmer barrier of early light, earliest light, really. This light wall, a new idea to me, represented, he said, the exterior wall of the black hole within which our whole universe lives! Wow. Immediately sped past my understanding. Just did a little quick research on this and found nothing. Could be my hearing. Yet another sensory limitation when it comes to learning about the universe.
On the way out Ruth said she was expecting something like that at the end. Why? Because in the film they had presented black holes as violent, destructive forces, so in the end they’d need to show their good side. Not a scientific conclusion, but still a damned good one. I missed the setup and it was there. Ruth is 10.
