(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Daily Space: The Eagle Nebula [1]
['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-07-09
The Book of Daniel 5:15 And now wise men, astrologers, were brought to read this writing, and to explain the meaning of these words. But they could not do it.
Looking at the stars was apparently not a great way to interpret your basic “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” but de Cheseaux did think things could be flipped around, so that the motion of stars and planets could be made to explain some passages of time mention in Daniel.
It can be frustrating that guys like de Cheseaux can at one moment be doing something that seems perfectly reasonable, and at the next be trying to twist their observations into making an object thousands of light years away say something about an obscure prediction of events on Earth. But even for the most stridently anti-religious people of the 18th century, which de Cheseaux was not, it was impossible to disentangle events in Biblical literature and attempts to date the past.
That’s because their world lacked depth. They had no concept of how old anything was. Or how far away the stars they were observing actually might be. Thanks to Danish Astronomer Ole Roemer, they did have some idea of the speed of light. But still … they had no deep space, and most importantly, no deep time. It would take Scottish geologist James Hutton to begin pushing back the scale of time at the end of the 18th century, giving room for theories of creation that didn’t involve a heavy load of miracles. Most people lived in a snapshot universe, one whose existence lacked the time or space for rational explanation.
For de Cheseaux, history was short, the stars were close, and even if the Earth was no longer at the center of the Solar System, it was surely the point of the universe. Suffice to say, de Cheseaux ultimately spent a lot more time calculating “measures of the great revolutions of the diurnal, and lunar and solar periods of the heavens” and trying to fit then into a system of “epoch cycles” than he did spotting additional nebula. It’s frustrating. But understandable.
But when it comes to the Eagle Nebula, creation does come up in more than a biblical sense. This is, after all, a “star factory.” New stars, and new stellar systems, are being born there. Some 4.6 billion years ago, it’s likely that our Sun came from such a place, born along with a large number of sibling stars, before being borne along to a more rarified location by time, gravity and the breath of the galactic winds. That’s pretty majestic in any book.
That section of the nebula that look pretty birdish, is also associated with one of the most famous images created by the Hubble Telescope.
“Pillars of Creation,” Eagle Nebula, Hubble Telescope, 1995
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/9/2109338/-Daily-Space-The-Eagle-Nebula
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
