Thursday, August 19, 2010

"Two Cultures" My Ass

So I'm reading the news at Raw Story, and come across this headline that reads Magnetic mega-star challenges black hole theory...I click on it, chuckling to myself, What has that Bono gone and done now?—only to find, once I begin reading the story, that the magnetic megastar referenced in the headline is a literal star, of a particularly large size, and possessing magnetic properties...You know, literally...Naturally, I was a little deflated (and pissed off--who the fuck do these science guys think they are? So fucking literal and everything—playing their little Science Mind-Games, no doubt)...

Well, I read the story anyway, and the thrust of it is that a star located within a cluster known as Westerlund 1 derived from a magnetar that is believed to have possessed a mass at least 40 times greater than the sun—so great that the result should have been a black hole, and not the relatively svelte neutron star that it became...It's posited that this mysterious outcome was achieved because the star somehow "slimmed to a lower mass", causing it to develop into a neutron star...This occurred ostensibly because the star was born with an evil twin!!!

"The answer, says the paper, could lie in a binary system: the star that became the magnetar was born with a stellar companion. As the stars evolved, they began to interact, and the companion star, like a demonic twin, began to steal mass from the progenitor star."

So, I'm trying now to remember if Kirstie Alley ever acted on a soap opera (and wondering if she has a twin), when, scrolling up the page, I take a good look at the accompanying illustration:


Tell me that's not Bono's eye!!!

Pretty spooky shit, right?

Just goes to show—there's no reason to ever be intimidated by Science. Approach it with a skeptical, but open mind, and you never know where it'll lead...

No comments:

Post a Comment