Top o’ the mornin’ to ya, lads ‘n lassies!
What a day - St. Patrick’s Day on a Friday…the fields are turning emerald, the skies are a soft misty gray, and I’m spinnin’ Dublin’s golden oldies later for senior citizen audiences up the road. We’ll be starting with the usual holiday bangers like “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder”, but if all goes well, and my shamrock suspenders are well-received, we might learn about “Jump Around.”
Call me a gleeful leprechaun, for I’ve pulled a fast one on the weather gods, and logged you an alt-text astronomical observation before it got cloudy. Pull up a chair - we’re going millions of light years today.
Twinning
If you’re seeing stars, you might want to sit down, or learn to slip the jab. If you’re seeing double stars, put the pint down and go home, laddie.
Unless you’re an astronomer.
Many stars in the universe are binary. (Our sun is not. I’m going to blurt out a politically incorrect joke at a star party soon if I’m not careful.)
Wednesday evening rolled around, clear and cool, the brilliant azure sky deepening to a midnight blue as the sun set. The 12.5” reflector stood ready to jump into the deep end of the sky.
Leo the Lion is one of the few constellations that sort of looks like the name. The head and mane of the lion are formed by a backwards question mark of stars, often called “the sickle.” At the corner of the rough curve, pale yellow Algieba shines across 130 light years of space. (Remember, that distance is 130 times 5.88 trillion miles.)
A swing of the scope, a quick eyepiece change to zoom in, and BOOM: Algieba is split into two golden dandelions, tawny yellow stars orbiting around each other with the slimmest black line of space separating them.
The turbulence of Earth’s atmosphere makes the light dance and shimmer, dazzling my eye.
I peer at this line between them, the “split”, a little closer this evening. These two giant stars (one 23 times bigger than our own sun) orbit each other at an average distance of 170 astronomical units, or AU’s.
An AU is the distance from the earth to the sun - roughly 93 million miles. If we had a space highway, and could drive to the sun at sixty miles per hour, it would take us about 177 years.
It would take 30,000 years to drive from Algieba A to Algieba B.
I looked at that little sliver of black between the golden stars, 130 light years away.
I overuse the word “wow” like folks will abuse the four letter oaths in the bars this evening. The punch is gone. But sometimes, there’s nothing left to say.
But wait, there’s more…
There should be some galaxies right ‘round…there.
I pushed the scope east ever so slightly. Leo skies are dim, with only a few field stars floating through the eyepiece. It’s looking out of the galactic plane into deep space. If we live in the galactic “suburbs”, instead of gazing at the lights of downtown in the heart of the galaxy, we’re looking past the farms on the outskirts of town towards the wilderness of deep space.
Suddenly, the hint of an idea of a ghost caught my eye. A gray smudge announced itself with a feeble glow against the black nothingness.
Zoom in with higher power…
Yes! And a second smudge.
60 million light years. The photon arriving at the mirror of my telescope, bouncing off another mirror, focused through a lens, then striking my eye…had been traveling for 60 million years.
It had started out in the galaxy pair NGC 3227 + 3226, an interacting duo that’s “relatively close” by cosmic standards.
3227 is a Seyfert galaxy, active, dynamic, harboring a supermassive black hole in it’s heart, nuking surrounding space with vast amounts of radiation, as 3226 dances around it in the distance. They appear close, a “double galaxy” near the double star Algieba, but…
3227 is about the size of our own milky way galaxy. 3226 stands apart by a fifth of the apparent width.
Pardon me while I calculate….
Say the milky way is 100,000 light years across.
A fifth is 20,000 light years.
It would take (roughly) 11.2 million years to drive a light year at 60 miles per hour.
(Thank goodness for the internet telling me what to do with all these zeroes…)
TWO HUNDRED TWENTY FOUR BILLION YEARS to make the trip by car (contrasting the 30,000 years to drive between the stars of Algieba).
Given the universe is about 13.8 billion years old…well, we’re serving brain pretzels with green beer today.
The Look of It
So, what did it look like? At 228x magnification, the two small blurs were mostly featureless. Each one had a slightly brighter core that faded off into a tiny cloud of light. The view had about eight stars from our own galaxy - field stars - and all around, a vast, infinite void of blackness.
Somebody get me my thesaurus. I refuse to say “wow.”
By Jove! Remarkable!
And from the backyard, too…
Treasures from Earth
“Oh, I think I know this song!”
The strings and whistles snaked through the air in a sinuous Irish melody. A drum, pounded the chilly air over the grimy parking lot. There was a mention of liquor in the lyrics.
My brother Zakk fetched his second wind. We were overdone by this time at the Shamrock Fest years ago (although neither of us had any of the green beer….or whiskey.)
“Oh no…no…I don’t. It’s all starting to blur. Maybe it’s time to go home.”
So we did, and the memory remains, eliciting a fond chuckle.
With no shortage of Bing and pennywhistles today (and hopefully some good ol’ Dropkick Murphys), I thought to bring you something off the beaten path…a real “four leaf clover” of a classical nugget.
John Field (1782-1837) pioneered the Nocturne, eventually dazzling Chopin with the now-famous possibilities. Dig his Nocturne No. 1 in E Flat Major, as played by John O’Conor.
And happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Happy St Patrick's Day, Josh! Great post!