Oh, Exquisite, Sublime Cosmos
Image results for carina nebula
The Hubble telescope, newly invigorated with replaced parts and newer technologies is hard at work capturing for the delectation of the international community's cosmologists, astronomers, physicists and general scientists, wonderful new images of space, time and the Universe. The universe as we know it, is but a fraction of the universe as it truly is, and revelations such as those which Hubble are enabling science to further evaluate the cosmos leaves us all in awe.A celestial butterfly comprised of a 'rolling cauldron of gases', impossibly heated to 10,000 degrees Celsius, travelling space at over 965,600 kilometres an hour. A strikingly beautiful image of a nebula in the shape of a butterfly, how utterly fanciful and how like Nature itself, this vast cloud, pinched at its waist, of stellar dust and gas. All that is now left in time and space of a star whose size was once five times that of the Sun's mass. Now labelled the Butterfly Nebula.
Another venerable presence, that of a nebulous gaseous pillar, a cloud of dust and cloud, three light-years long, from whose massive force field bursts out the stellar life-force of newly-emerged stars, some hundred thousand, and counting. Moving within the column that has bred it, gaining strength and momentum, to finally burst at an impossible-to-imagine velocity from its nursery into the cosmos.
The search for galaxies - like our own - vastly dissimilar to our own - unimaginably numerous - vastly distant, existing in that great void that is our Universe, brimmingly resplendent with dark matter, ravenous black holes, imploded stars; collapsars - and mystery. Lifeforms, we like to think, that would rival our own, vastly more intelligent than our own, unrecognizable to us. And we search, as yet unavailingly.
God does not play dice with the Universe.
Clearly implausible; could be that
Nature does, for this is her creation.
Perhaps not quite everything is
Quantifiable, explicable, but more random
In Nature's sublime indifference.
That will be what will be.
A wondrous spectacle and presence
That is this inexhaustible, unknowable Cosmos.
The Firmament above us. Vast, impregnable.
We, defiantly intent on knowing
Exploring this, our Universe. Believing there
Are no secrets Nature is intent on shielding
From our curious search of her Universe.
Time and the puny tides of Humankind.
Labels: Environment, Nature, Science
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 10, 2009
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