*THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
70 Falmouth Street Portland,Maine 04103
43.6667° N 70.2667° W
Altitude: 10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
2021-2022: XXXI
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."
-Oscar Wilde
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Monday, October 18, 2021
Meanwhile, in the Bedroom
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Thanks to subscribers DG, MJ, TB and HH
for bringing this story to my attention.
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A mid-autumn Monday is a perfect time to discuss timelessness. Or, what we should call the sense of timelessness. Our world furnishes us with ample time markers, be it Earth's diurnal motion that both defines a day and subdivides it into morning, afternoon and night or the planet's revolutionary motion resulting in the regular seasonal transitions. For the benefit of southern subscribers protected from the cold weather's ravages, right now we're in the peak of foliage* season here in Northern New England. Apart from the turning and orbiting planet, we track time with clocks, calendars, phones, wrist watches, and all manner of devices that have sliced, diced, and packaged the otherwise undifferentiated fourth dimension.
Now, imagine time's passage without any such convenient gradations. The slow silent lapse of time in the pitch black and boundless hollows of interplanetary space. Out there a miniscule rock once tumbled, careening through the shapeless gulfs separating the Sun's attendant worlds. Though it must have felt utterly isolated as it traveled along its aimless path, it did not tumble alone. It was but one of innumerable boulders, mountains and primordial fragments that are still hidden within the inky darkness. Were we to render all of them luminescent and observable, the night sky would resemble a firefly swarm as these meteoroids and asteroids darted across our view field en route to more distant skies.
Our concern today, however, is with this one rock: a greyish, three-pound melon-shaped remnant of the infant solar system. Until just the other day, its protracted history had hardly been one of quest and adventure. Instead, it sailed through the timeless void, ticking away the centuries like seconds. Though its speed was often measured in thousands of mph, it moved in a realm devoid of reference frames, apart from the solitary bright star that brightened into a fiery disk on approach and then diminished into an incandescent pinprick as it soared away back to the rarefied outer solar system. Time and time and time again, it followed its heliocentric orbit without so much as a whisper of excitement. Unlike Earth rocks subject to the slow, but still dynamic rock cycle, this errant, interplanetary projectile experienced neither geological upheaval nor chemical alteration. It was just as it had always been since whatever chance collision in the unfathomable past chipped it away from its larger parent body. After that detachment, or likely irregular series of detachments, it remained immutable throughout millions if not billions of years.
Then, it veered too close to a major world and became ensnared by its gravity. Although the Sun is far and away the solar system's predominant massive body, a planet will always capture a smaller body that ventures within its boundary. Suddenly, after the passage of countless millennia in the perpetual night, this fragment found itself approaching a bluish-green sphere dabbled by whitish filaments. As it drew closer, its speed increased and had it been capable of observing the world below, it would have seen an interplay of light and shadow against a broad landscape that eventually resolved itself into sharp landforms embedded in vast water bodies. As the descent quickened, it pushed against the rarefied upper atmosphere and experienced frictional heating, a fierce temperature rise compared to the deep chill of the void. As the rock plummeted at breakneck speeds, it encountered a denser mix of gases and the heat became like engulfing flame that ignited the sky and left a cloud-thick trail in its wake.
The once featureless continent shrunk to a landmass of forest tracts and distant glacial caps. These opened into land boundaries pockmarked by intricate cities and smaller towns.
It approached one town that, itself, was soon resolved into individual streets and buildings. Had it scrutinized that bustling berg, the rock would have noticed a veritable frenzy of activity, both human and otherwise, despite the darkness, a stark contrast to the formless realms of space. Rapidly, and without any warning, it became a fireball that tore through the sky and crashed headlong into home in Golden, British Columbia, a town of 3,700 souls about 440 miles from Vancouver.
Its arrival shattered the ceiling, resounded like a cannon shot and tore a 66-year old woman named Ruth Hamilton away from sleep's timeless oblivion. At first she thought a fallen tree had crashed through her home. Then, to her astonishment, she found a rock in her bed.
A charcoal gray four-billion year old stone that, had it been capable of sight, might have looked a bit nonplussed as it found itself an interloper in a lady's bedchamber. She alerted the police, who at first believed the object to have been flotsam displaced by a blasting crew. However, no blasting had occurred in the area around that time (on October 3rd.) The investigating officer then deduced that the bed rock (paused for forced laugh) originated from outer space. Reports of a fireball in the area that night confirmed his conclusion.
And, at once, Ruth Hamilton and the rock that impertinently crashed onto her bed, became global celebrities. Far flung media outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC have reported on the meteorite atop the sheets.
Welcome to our unquiet Earth, little celestial wanderer. Though your fame will likely be fleeting in this world of the three-second attention span, you will find your new home as intriguing as it is dynamic. You'll find a frenzy of change and flux everywhere, even in those places derisively described as "sleepy backwaters."
Despite your eon-long odyssey through the ethereal realm, you blazed across the sky at 50 times the speed of sound and raged as hot as a blast furnace. Though you will soon be forgotten, for now, at least, you're the talk of planet Earth. Good show!
*Incidentally, three cheers to the
old world sorcerers who have loitered about since the troubled reign of
Charles I. The foliage they have cast onto the forests this year has
been iridescent dragon fire! Drop dead, howling with agony gorgeous.
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