Moon Wars and Octopus Time
There's also been an explosion (don't worry, it happened 8 billion years ago).
Hello Earthlings,
I hope your weekends were lovely — whether that be due to Mother’s Day celebrations, a cozy cocktail or perhaps a chill video game you spent hours playing while zoning out. All three for me. And speaking of video games, have any of you played Outer Wilds? I know this sounds dramatic, but I think it changed my life. It’s a stunning space exploration game where you get to use twisty physics concepts to your advantage: black holes, time warps, gravity wells and such. Plus, the ending is remarkable.
Anyway, now let’s get into some real life science. First things first, moon wars.
Basically, for the longest time, Saturn wasn’t only revered as the ringy-est world in our solar system, but also the moony-est. It’d been down in our textbooks as possessing 83 glowing satellites. Then, February came around.
Much to Saturn's dismay, scientists confirmed Jupiter actually has 12 more moons than we thought. That gave the gas giant a whopping total of 92 companions and the title of moon king! But that wasn’t the end of this rivalry. On Wednesday, international astronomers thickened the plot further by recognizing 62 new (quite oddly shaped) moons of Saturn. And, well, one researcher doesn't expect Jupiter to take its crown back any time soon.
Though this is pretty cool in itself, I think it’s always immensely interesting when scientists find out more information on what constitutes a moon and how many we have across our solar system because moons are way more complicated than you’d imagine. For instance, scientists still haven’t totally concluded how Earth’s moon was formed, and even though we’ve located thousands of exoplanets across the universe, we’re yet to certainly confirm the existence of an exomoon. Strange.
Elsewhere in spacetime, scientists have also pinpointed evidence of what they call the “largest cosmic explosion ever seen.” The blast has a classic robotic name, AT2021lwx, and is likely the result of a supermassive black hole violently disrupting a cloud of interstellar gas. Technically, it was detected in 2020 but it wasn’t until now that scientists realized the absolute grandeur of the event. They say it’s 10x brighter than any known supernova!
Moreover, this situation took place 8 billion light-years away from where you’re sitting. To be clear, that means it took 8 billion years for light emanating from the event to travel to human telescopes, so what scientists are witnessing now represents what happened 8 billion years ago when the universe was only about 6 billion years old. That’s billions of years before the dinosaurs roamed Earth, and in fact, before our solar system existed at all.
While perusing the web this week, I also stumbled upon a captivating article that asks the question: is our perception of time associated with our bodily experience of the world? In other words, humans are always walking forward, being pulled down to Earth by gravity, and as we have two eyes in the front of our faces, are always looking ahead. These are all very linear qualities, maybe relating to our linear perception of time — despite “time” being a non-linear concept.
So, the article’s writer conjectures, what would octopus time look like?
Unlike us, octopuses can move in any direction at any time because they live underwater where gravity doesn’t limit them. Their eyes are also on opposite sides of their heads, so there’s kind of no such thing as “ahead” or “behind” for them. How do they feel time? Do they feel time? I highly recommend reading this if you get a chance.
Pivoting a bit to commercial spaceflight because nary a day goes by when we don’t have some sort of update on that, it looks like Virgin Galactic expects to fly beyond Earth for the first time in two years this month with Unity 25. The company is sending 4 Virgin Galactic employees to the edge of space, and if all goes well with that, says “commercial service opens in late June.”
It definitely sounds high-tech and awesome, but when thinking about commercial spaceflight, I find it’s always important to consider things like who will benefit from this endeavor and how it’ll impact our relationship with Earth.
Virgin Galactic alone, for instance, is charging something like $450,000 per customer and expects to eventually generate a minimum of $2.7 million in revenue per flight — and on the other hand, many scientists are worried about how the new sector will exacerbate the climate crisis. Virgin Galactic projects a possible flight rate of once per week. Food for thought.
Oh, and so we don’t leave Jupiter out to dry, let’s end this first newsletter with the fact that JUICE (The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) is well on its way to decoding the Jovian lifestyle for us (no, Jovian is not a random dude, it just means Jupiter stuff). Why is this big, you wonder? Well, one mission of JUICE is literally to seek evidence of ancient life on Jupiter’s moons. Looking at you, Europa.
You see, Jupiter may not have the most moons, but perhaps it has the best moons.
Until next week,
Mona