By Wink
Kitten
Final Frontier
Think you have free-floating angst? The idea of black holes roaming interstellar space has me almost as anxious as my black kitten lying atop my computer keyboard.
An international team of researchers say they’ve confirmed that a possible microlensing event — when starlight is bent by gravity — seen in 2011 was due to a free-floating black hole.
Scientists have long assumed there are lots of these but till now had not found one. Collapsing stars, which cause black holes, are visible, but once they turn black against the black backdrop of space it’s hard seeing them.
But luck prevailed in 2011 when two teams looking for such microlensing saw a star that appeared to brighten for no known reason. Intrigued, they spent six years analyzing its changing light through the Hubble Telescope.
Then the star’s position appeared to change, which they figured could only be due to an unseen moving object exerting a force pulling on the light as it passed by, i.e. a black hole.
First they had to rule out the possibility any light they were seeing came from the lensing, then that the magnification had a long-enough duration. I don’t need near that time to confirm that the CDC, FDA and other alphabet-soup agencies move glacially, but that’s why I’m not a scientist. The research team, after 11 years, measured this black hole at 7 solar masses moving at 28 mph.
Now we’ve dispatched the Webb Telescope, far more powerful than the Hubble, to its observation point 1 million miles away — sure, we have hungry people right next door, but $10 billion is chump change compared to the benefits of gathering more data to confuse us — we are apt to find these black holes almost everywhere.
I used to be jealous of the Webb’s 21-foot-wide main mirror (the Hubble’s is only 8 feet), but WalMart doesn’t carry space-telescope type cameras. Besides, the prospect of seeing a black hole exert such gravity not even light can escape it coming to stores near me cools my ardor even further.
Add Wink taking charge of my PC keyboard — he likes how the keys give, clatter and make the monitor go crazy. Cats find mischief like that endlessly entertaining, but it makes my dread goes galactic.
“Now you have an excuse for why your stories make no sense,” my wife said.
“Wrong,” I replied. “The problem is now they do.”
Wink watches me work on my nearby Mac — I’m so scattered I could use 20 computers actually — but I need the PC to connect with the office server. So I have to boot him when I do layout Tuesdays because he’ll also attack the mouse. The wire maze that connects these gizmos is like catnip to him also.
Which brings to mind climate change, Covid, the Biden Administration and other free-floating black holes we don’t need a microlens to see. It’s hard living with all things but death and taxes uncertain, so to tether my angst I went to the Pullman Tavern.
“Bartender?”
“You again?” he sighed.
“Bring me a zombie.”
In walked the international team of researchers.
“Bring them zombies too,” I said.
“We can use them,” said the lead scientist. “We spent 11 years on this black hole project.”
“What else did you do?”
“Ate, slept and watched Monty Python reruns. And you?”
“Put out papers, chased kittens off my keyboard and schlepped around.”
“It’s a wonderful life,” he said. “We should get together for some serious schlepping sometime.”
We tossed down our zombies. “Got a wife?” the lead scientist asked me.
“Another round,” I told the bartender. “Make mine a triple this time.”
“You should look to the heavens for relief,” said the scientist.
BOOM!
“What was that?”
“Another SpaceX satellite knocked out of orbit by the recent solar storm,” said the bartender. “Forty of 49 launched last week have re-entered the atmosphere and burned up or are close to doing so. Now we need umbrellas for more than meteor showers.
“What was Elon Musk thinking?” I asked.
“An Internet satellite constellation,” the lead scientist said. “Commercial, of course.”
BOOM!
“Another?”
In walked the crew of the Starship Enterprise.
“Getting hairy out there?” I asked them.
“Why don’t you go where no man has ever gone before?” Capt. Kirk advised me.
“Die soon and broke,” Spock added.
They all tossed down zombies, then Kirk told them, “Beam up Scottie.” My angst grew worse when Klingons attacked the starship …
qwert;’yuiop[]asdfghjkl;’zxcvbnm,./ etc.
“You did not just write this,” said my wife, peering over my shoulder.
“Wink did,” I said.
“Roams all over.”
“Wink?” I asked.
“Your writing.”
“Free floats,” I corrected her. “See how I connect scattered themes into greater wholes?”
“Black holes, maybe,” my wife said. “A normal person would need 11 years and a microlens to make sense of it.“
“You’re just jealous.”
“You need more than light to get bent,” she said.