We Are Stardust

On another wasted day spent not looking for a job, the pull of the two hundred plus channels of my parent’s digital television sucked away my forlorn efforts at productivity. How can a man resist Discovery Knowledge when the enticing title Horizon – Super Massive Black Holes hooks you like a trout? I did briefly wonder if there was a cooler arrangement of words in the English Language than Super Massive Black Holes, swiftly concluding in the negative. Having just watched Future Weapons, preceded by Battlefield, my war lust satiated, a journey to gargantuan cosmic majesty was just what the doctor ordered. At least I’m learning, I thought, having written off the day, knowing that a perfectly good job was not going to be applied for just yet.

Apparently, at the centre of every Galaxy is an aforementioned Super Massive Black Hole (great name for a band). These entities range from millions to billions of solar masses, and are instrumental in galaxy formation. An embryonic galaxy is a spinning disk of gas, largely hydrogen and helium. Like a figure skater pulling in their arms to increase their rate of spin, the cloud condenses and accelerates its rotation. The mass in the centre of the disk increases in density, until finally the voracious predator of matter that is the black hole bursts forth into existence to terrorise its locality. The glutinous singularity consumes its surroundings, gorging on primeval matter, mighty in girth and power. Then something remarkable happens. So voracious is its consumption that a quasar forms around it (I admit, the formation and behaviour of this mysterious body are lost on me). The energy of consumption is so great that the quasar pushes surrounding matter away, rather like the enormous outer pressure exerted by the nuclear furnace of a star that prevents a catastrophic collapse. Eventually, the Black hole, by its own voracity, pushes local matter beyond its reach, allowing surviving gas to orbit in what will become a new galaxy. The incomprehensible vigour of the quasar causes energy differentials to fan out in the gas cloud, ripples on a pond pushing gas into areas of increased local density. And thus the magic of galactic creation is realised; these areas of increased density coalesce and collapse, until the matter at the centre of each is under such pressure that spontaneous nuclear fusion gives rise to billions of stars. Through generations of stars, matter is cooked into different forms; oxygen, carbon and the heavy elements forged in the stellar furnace to be thrown out into space by the cataclysmic death of its creator, then to converge in the ancient and exceptionally slow game of planet building, from whence life arises to gaze upon the majesty of the heavens.

He giveth; He taketh away. In three billion years time, our galactic neighbour Andromeda will smash head on into our own dear Milky Way in two words that defy imaginative comprehension, a Galactic Collision. Assuming our planet has not already been consumed by the morbid obesity of our own sun, such a collision will send mighty shockwaves of radiation ripping through the galaxy, destroying suns and scouring the atmosphere and oceans from the Earth in a fraction of a second; vaporising the fragile solidity of our planet. The parent black holes of Andromeda and the Milky Way will coalesce into an almighty giant of a singularity, from which, eventually, a new, massive galaxy will form.

Sometimes, the sheer enormity of creation is so profoundly moving I feel like I’m going to cry.