The Horrendous Space Kablooie!

Sorry, Bill Watterson, but I just couldn't resist using this one...all hail Calvin and Hobbes!

This comic illustrates a point that confronts us when we attempt to speak about the titanic phenomena occurring in the universe every day. We can speak of a supernova exploding "with the force of x megaton bombs", or a star that "could hold a million of our suns"...but ultimately all this is meaningless. When the standard unit of interstellar measurement, the light year, is about 8.7 x 10¹² miles, human language (and thus, comprehension) just sort of...blanks out.

Here's a lovely example: I'm currently watching a JINA-CEE video about novas in parasitic binary star systems. Essentially, a small, dense star (such as a neutron star) will form an orbital relationship with a larger, less-dense giant. The denser of the two will start vacuuming material off its host, adding to its mass; however, because of its size, it compresses the material into its "crust" to the point that fusion ignition occurs.

To understand what happens next, let's pretend that the earth (since proton stars can be earth-sized) has a crust made entirely of hydrogen bombs. That's right: everything underneath your feet, mountains and fields, valleys and highlands, is just a carpet of thermonuclear devices twenty miles deep. And they're all linked up to go off at the exact same instant.

KABLOOIE.

And these are actually some of the smallest cosmic explosions in the universe, in terms of energy yield. They aren't even supernovas - the two stars might be momentarily shaken by the eruption, but otherwise they continue on their merry way; in some cases, novas just keep happening, over and over, in a predictable sequence, for millions of years.

I'm utterly enthralled by these kinds of giant cosmic phenomenon. My current favorite is the observed merging of two supermassive black holes, an occurrence so unbelievably violent, it sent shockwaves through the fabric of spacetime. I say that again: it caused reality to distort. The LIGO detector, which tracked the occurrence, recorded a fluctuation in the laser-measured distance between two mirrors. An even that happened 1.3 billion years ago can cause distance itself to change. That's mind-blowing.

Rick Out.

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