THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
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70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
43.6667° N 70.2667° W
Altitude: 10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
Julian date: 2458735.5
2019-2020: V
"Sure, Mr. Bacon, if you want me to pretend I wrote these
plays instead of you, I guess I could do it. I'm going to end up looking
stupid, though."
-Shakespeare
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Monday, September 9, 2019
The Eyes of Sauron
____________________________
Happy 21st Birthday, Jacqueline,
once known as the infernally adorable
little girl. 21 today! I'd try to write
something touching today, dearest daughter,
but I'm under the influence of
three nerve medications.
_______________________________
There is far more to the sky than meets the eye.
The star-bedizened heavens we admire each clear night are akin to the
bubbles and foam visible along the ocean shore. While they might
encompass the view, they are minuscule aspects of a deep broad sea that is
quickly obscured into opacity beyond the shore and harbors vast realms well
out of reach.
Today, we quickly explore two such places: both of them deeply hidden in
the sky, but both of which resemble a rather famous eye.
[image: Hubble_Observes_Glowing,_Fiery_Shells_of_Gas.jpg]
*The Eye of Sauron Nebula!*
Oh, if only this object were visible to us in our backyards! Located in
the constellation of Sagittarius, this nebula would regard us all
malevolently: the remote menace appearing as a minuscule orb of fire
describing a low arc along the southern summer sky. Of course, being
10,000 light years from Earth, it isn't visible without a telescope.
Moreover, the fearsome features seen in the image above are rendered
visible only by sophisticated astrophotography. Even if we could observe
this nebula from our own backyards, it would appear white and diffuse, as
our eyes are not designed to distinguish colors at low light levels.
Still, we can dream....
The Eye of Sauron Nebula, otherwise known as M1-42 to the astronomical
bookkeepers, is a planetary nebula that bears an eerie resemblance to the
notorious necromancer's eye in the "Lord of the Rings" novels. These
nebulae are the death throes of solar mass stars that cast away their outer
layers once their core nuclear reactions cease. They are so named because
they resemble planets when viewed telescopically. These nebulae leave a
white dwarf core in their centers: these white dwarf stars are not active,
but instead slowly wick away their heat through the painfully inefficient
radiative cooling process. Mutual repulsions of the electrons contained
within prevent the dwarf from collapsing. In the "Eye of Sauron" nebula we
are seeing how our own Sun might appear when it perishes in a planetary
nebula in about 6.5 billion years.
[image: 525831main_N4151_wide_665.jpg]
*The Eye of Sauron Galactic Center!*
Oh, if only this object were visible to....ok, we get it...
Here we're seeing the hyperactive center of the spiral galaxy NGC* 4151
Located 43 million light years from Earth (much farther away in the cosmic
sea than the nebula), NGC 4151 is one of the closest galaxies that harbors
an actively growing black hole. The "eye" and its surrounding region are
likely areas of turbulence created by dynamical interactions between the
black hole and nearby gases.
The photo above is a composite image of the galaxy's center in multiple
wavelengths. The "blue" pupil is collected from data from the Chandra
X-Ray observatory. The yellow fringes were captured by the Kapetyn
telescope in La Palma and the encircling red structure was imaged by the
National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, an array of radio
telescopes in New Mexico.
This image is another example of how much the human eye doesn't perceive.
After all, the visible
part of the spectrum is a rather thin section: 0.0035% of the spectrum if
it were measured linearly. Developing the capacity to observe the Universe
along other regions of the EM spectrum has revealed a cosmos more complex
and wondrous than anything we could have ever beheld in the
sky. The "Eyes" of Sauron are merely two examples of what lurks in the
unbounded hollows of perpetual night.
*NGC: New General Catalog
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