Aphrodite: The Love Goddess
Cupid rules us all, or so the saying goes. Neither god nor mortal can resist love's allure. Desperate love seekers have ascended imposing summits, traversed harrowing deserts, slain ferocious monsters, and -in the most extreme example-sat through a Sunday afternoon Rom-com during the NFL post season to curry the favor and win the hearts of those they most adore. While some philistine biologists ascribe these irrational behaviours to the "procreational imperative," the rest of us know that Aphrodite, goddess of love, is responsible. She has not only instilled this sweetest strain of insanity into our souls, but in some cases, has aided the lovelorn in their quests to ensnare elusive prey. Though her interventions deprive some fair ladies and fine men of their free will, Aphrodite at least strives to bring about an abundance of happy endings and to expand the human population.
Ironically, Aphrodite's birth was not the result of the coital act. After castrating his father Ouranos, god of the sky, Cronos cast his detached member into the sea of the Cypriot coast. From the foam that bubbled up from the submerged genitals arose Aphrodite along with a wide assortment of less eye-pleasing creatures., such as the dreaded furies. Having been born out of the organ from which all prurient passions originate, it is natural that Aphrodite became the goddess presiding over love, sexual commerce and sensual pleasure. Though not as omnipresent as Zeus, Aphrodite has appeared numerous times throughout these mythological excursions. She cast a spell on Ariadne to make her fall in love with Theseus so that she would help him to escape the labyrinth. She gave Hippomenes three golden apples with which to win the hand of Atalanta, the huntress who, to Aphrodite's chagrin, had resolved to remain celebate. The crafty and swift Atalanta had promised to marry the first man to beat her in a foot race. Many men tried, but failed to do so. When she raced Hippomenes, he cast a golden apple in front of her at three separate times. The apples were so beautiful that she stooped to retrieve all three. As a result, she fell behind and lost the race.
Of course, Aphrodite showed another side of herself when her son Eros fell in love with Psyche, whose beauty was equal to her own. Having lost Eros when she tried to look at him in full light, Psyche appealed to Aphrodite for assistance, only to be given a series of exceedingly difficult labors to complete in order to prove her love was genuine. She did finish them all - with assistance- and eventually was reconciled to Eros and even made peace with his mother.
Perhaps the greatest irony was that the love goddess was desperately unhappy in her marriage. She has been required to marry Hephaestus, the malformed god of fires, furnaces and craftsmen. Their union was hardly blissful and, to nobody's surprise, she cuckolded him almost at once with the war god Ares, the one male for whom she harbored the most intense passion. Even though Hephaestus ensnared his faithless wife and her paramour in a trap and humiliated them in front the other Olympians, Aphrodite and Ares remained lovers throughout.
As was true with Zeus yesterday, so much more could be said about Aphrodite. Yet, suffice it to say that if you've ever been consumed with unbridled passion, behaved beyond all rationality, plunged into despair's unsounded depths due tos lost love or found yourself at heaven's highest pinnacle over a love requited, you can attribute it all to Aphrodite, goddess of love. She rules us all, though at times, not too gently.
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THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Remote Planetarium 133: Quasar Light, Quasar Bright
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Happy Birthday, Brother Richard!
Look at it this way. You'd be a two year old toddler if we lived on Saturn.
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Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects.
These strange and distant quasars are some of the Universe's most energetic entities. Today, our penultimate day of our quest toward the observable Universe, we discuss quasars through the lovely use of the question/answer format.
What are quasars?
We believe that quasars are active galactic nuclei. Supermassive black holes with masses millions or sometimes billions of times greater than the Sun are the center of these active nuclei. The black holes are surrounded by large collections of gas called accretion disks. As this gaseous material falls into the black holes, immense amounts of energy are generated. In fact, the energy output is more than 1000 times greater than that of our entire galaxy.
Why are they named "quasars?"
The name is a contraction of the term "quasi-stellar radio source." The first observations showed them to be star-like objects that produced unusually high levels of radio emissions. These objects were quite mysterious because they were so far away and they seemed so luminous. When first observed (1950s), astronomers knew of no mechanism capable of generating such prodigious amounts of energy.
How far away are they?
While some quasars are some of the most distant objects ever observed -because they were around during the earliest epochs of the Universe- some are closer. The quasar 3C 273, the first quasar to be discovered, is about 2.5 billion light years away and is one of the closest quasars.
Quasar 3C 273 A quasar within the constellation Virgo, 3C 273 is 2.5 billion light years away, making it one of the closest quasars to us. If it were 30 light years away from us, it would appear as bright as the Sun! Image: Hubble Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2
How do astronomers know the distance to objects as far away as quasars?
Redshifts. The light emitted by extremely remote objects will red-shifted as a consequence of their movement away from us. Light waves are elongated by this recession. Consequently, the light is shifted toward the lower energy region of the electromagnetic spectrum. We refer to this stretching as red-shifting because red light is at a lower energy than blue light. The more distant the object, the greater the red shift.
How many quasars exist?
Astronomers have counted about 750,000 quasara, many of which have been found with the Sloan Digital Survey.
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