Wednesday, November 27, 2013

"...an amazing wonder."


In most rural places around North Dakota, and most especially in winter when the air is dense and dry, looking up at night will afford your eyes an almost immobilizing view of a deep black sky dusted with stars surrounding the arc of the Milky Way. The stars and gases making up some of the galaxy's mass orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second around the center, brightest in the direction of Sagittarius, where a supermassive black hole at the heart is hidden, frame-dragging all the rest to spin slowly inwards. Its an amazing wonder.

Way out on the Orion-Cygnus arm, in the galactic rural area of the habitable zone, our solar system spins and bobs, up through the plane and back down, around and around, far from the high-energy Hadean zone of the center. And around Sol, our planet orbits, stabilized by a moon created in an amazing collision with an object called Theia which struck the young Earth at the exact angle necessary, neither too deep nor too shallow, gifting us tides and seasons and a soft light amid the stars which captivates all romantics. Its disc appears to us by night the same size as the sun's by day. An amazing wonder.

The Lakota people who have lived in the area for generations might call it "nahómni", meaning to spin around of its own accord, or by an outside force. They must have seen these discs often when travelling to the riverside for water as they camped nearby. Nature loves the circle, and a dancing circle spins. Everything spins inward toward the center, toward singularity.




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