Illustration by Michael Dwayne
I’ve been thinking about this for more than a year now, ever since I read an article in the Baltimore Sun about an astronomer who — after studying a particular galaxy cluster for close to seven years — discovered an erupting black hole so huge and powerful that only the universe-forming Big Bang can touch it in magnitude. And what is it that I’ve been thinking about? Well, our collective insignificance of course, but also the unrelenting self-assurance (some would call it arrogance) of scientists — the ability to trot out numbers that boggle the minds of everyone except other scientists to “prove” occurrences laymen can’t begin to under-stand.
Examples from the abovementioned astronomical eureka:
• The newly discovered black hole is located about 2.6 billion light-years away from Earth. Given that a light-year (the distance that a beam of light travels in one calendar year) is 5.9 trillion miles — or, in somewhat more graspable terms, 63,000 times the distance between Earth and the sun — the black hole is 15.34 sextillion miles away. Using all the zeros, that’s 15,340,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Armed with optical and X-ray-measuring telescopes, farsighted astronomers now know this for a fact!
• The opening of the black hole, the newspaper article said, is the size of our solar system, a mere 7.44 billion (or so) miles wide, just about 80 times the distance between Earth and the sun — or, if you really want something you can sink your teeth into, about 31,000 times the distance from here to the moon. Anyway, it’s peanuts compared to 2.6 billion light-years; I don’t know why I even mentioned it.
• More pertinent, this black hole, which researchers say has been violently active for some 100 million years, has wolfed down “the equivalent of 300 million stars the size of our sun.” Not only has it been ingesting stars and other celestial debris at a gluttonous rate, but it’s also been doing some serious belching. According to the scientific journal Nature, the black hole has been expelling energy across an area some 600 times the size of the Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years in diameter. Carry the seven zeros; that’s 60 million light-years of energy litter.
I clipped another newspaper article back in 2001 — just a brief because, let’s face it, this stuff’s all Greek to reporters; they’re not going to be able to embellish it or fact-check it. The article said astronomers had seen for the first time the “dark ages” of the universe, even before stars and galaxies had formed, by studying quasars, which are thought to be the bright centers of extremely remote galaxies, some on the very edge of the visible universe, more than 10 billion light-years away.
I’m sorry, I just don’t have the time to do the paperwork math — my calculator only goes to eight digits — to tell you how far that is in miles, and I’m sure you don’t want to know anyway. I mean, what does it matter? They’re just unfathomable numbers, like Oprah Winfrey’s annual income. Space — the final frontier nobody really cares about.
When I was a six-year-old kid, the universe was simple and meaningful. There was the sun, nine planets and a bunch of stars — oh, and one moon, our moon. Mercury was tiny and too hot; you’d burn to a crisp there. Venus was a bright spot seen with the naked eye in the night sky, and Mars possibly had Martians. Jupiter had the big red bullet hole and bands of pinkish clouds, and Saturn was ringed by a rainbow. (It was definitely my favorite; when we played “What Planet Do You Want to Be?” in first grade, I yelled out, “Saturn!” while the other kids fought over Earth.) Uranus, Neptune and Pluto had no discernible distinctions and thus were ignored, although, had we known then that Pluto was half the size of Mercury, it might have earned a nod as the most diminutive planet.
Stars then were just stars, not blue and red giants, supergiants and dwarfs grouped by relative temperature and luminosity factors into classes such as B81a or M5.5V stars. And the biggest multi-zero number bandied about was the distance from Earth to the sun — 93,000,000 miles — perfect for my $5.95 solar-powered calculator.