A twist in the fabric

All of us learned about gravity in elementary school, often starting with the anecdote about Isaac Newton seeing a falling apple and wondering why it was pulled toward the Earth.  What's weirdest about the phenomenon, though, is that while we can characterize gravitational force mathematically to just about any precision you want, explaining why it works is not nearly so easy.  Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity, visualized it as a warping of space -- that anything with mass literally pulls on the spacetime fabric, in much the way that a heavy weight depresses the surface of a trampoline.  Picture rolling a small ball toward the weight on the trampoline; the ball will speed up, but it's not because the weight is somehow magically pulling on the ball.  It's because the ball is following the contours of a warped space.

Move that two-dimensional model up by one dimension, and you have an idea of how gravity operates.

Even Einstein, though, couldn't figure out how to make his gravitational model work in the realm of the very small.  Trying to unite the theory of gravity with the theories of quantum mechanics has, so far, proven impossible.  That combo -- called a "Grand Unified Theory" -- has defied the best minds in the field.  In fact, just last month an experiment in Italy failed to find predicted violations of Pauli's Exclusion Principle which would have supported some of the leading contenders for a unified model, most notably string theory.

So it's back to the drawing board.  And despite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's statement that "scientists are always at the drawing board," this has got to be frustrating -- and raises question of whether a unified theory of gravity and quantum physics is even possible.

Meanwhile, a bit like the apocryphal bumblebee who by the principles of aerodynamics can't fly but doesn't know this so goes ahead and flies anyhow, gravity continues to warp space all around us even though we can't really explain it.  Just as well, because otherwise we'd obey Newton's First Law of Motion and go flying off the Earth at our current rate of speed in a direction tangent to its surface, until we encountered a fixed object, which in my case would be the wall of my house.

And out in space, gravity keeps twisting the fabric of spacetime, resulting in some pretty amazing structures.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up; just last week, there were two studies looking at the effects of extreme gravity on astronomical objects, both of which will make you glad we live here on a paltry little planet with a relatively small ability to warp space.

The first, out of the University of Washington, looked at the anomalous -- if beautiful -- shape of the Butterfly Nebula, the remnants of a star that exhausted its fuel and jettisoned the entire out of surface into a pair of mirror-image cones.

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Hubble ESA, NGC 6302 (50033189356), CC BY 2.0]

What apparently happened is that the star which blew up had a companion star, and the gravitational pull of that companion funneled the debris into the beautiful, gossamer "wings" the nebula shows today.  But even that hypothesis hasn't been enough to account for the nebula's odd shape.

"The Butterfly Nebula is extreme for the mass, speed and complexity of its ejections from its central star, whose temperature is more than two hundred times hotter than the Sun yet is just slightly larger than the Earth," said Bruce Balick, who led the team studying the nebula.  "I've been comparing Hubble images for years and I've never seen anything quite like it...  At this point, [all we have are] hypotheses.  What this shows us is that we don't fully understand the full range of shaping processes at work when planetary nebulae form.  The next step is to image the nebular center using the James Webb Space Telescope, since infrared light from the star can penetrate through the dust."

The second study, from NASA and the Goddard Space Flight Center, looked at a different way that a star can end its life.  It used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to look at a star in the galaxy ESO-583-G004, three hundred million light years away, and found evidence of a black hole that was in the process of swallowing a nearby star -- pulling it into a torus, or donut, shape.  It's unknown if the ill-fated star was already a companion to the black hole, or if it got gravitationally captured, but either way the outcome was the same.

I.e., not good.

The star was "tidally disrupted" -- for that, read "ripped to shreds" -- and the stellar material swung into an "accretion disk" as big as the Solar System.  "We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages," said Peter Maksym, of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, who co-authored the study.   "We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time...  We're looking somewhere on the edge of that donut.  We're seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that's being projected towards us at speeds of twenty million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light).  We really are still getting our heads around the event.  You shred the star and then it's got this material that's making its way into the black hole.  And so you've got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you've got what you actually see.  This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown."

Right, in fact, at Tyson's "drawing board."

It's a thrilling time for scientists; so much is explained, but every question that's answered raises ten more questions.  The hydra-headed nature of science is just how it goes, though.  And even if some of the big questions do eventually get answered -- whether, for example, there's a quantum theory of gravity -- I don't think we'll be reaching the edges of what's knowable for a very long time.

****************************************

The memory virus

It's virus season, which thus far I've been able to avoid participating in, but every time I go to the grocery store I see people who are hacking and snorting and coughing and I figure it's only a matter of time, despite my insistence on wearing a mask in public.  Viruses are odd beasts; they're obligate intracellular parasites, doing their evil work by hijacking your cellular machinery and using it to make more viruses.  Furthermore, they lack virtually all of the structures that cells have, including cell membranes, cytoplasm, and organelles.  They really are more like self-replicating chemicals than they are like living things.

Simian Polyoma Virus 40  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Phoebus87 at English Wikipedia, Symian virus, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is even stranger about viruses is that while some of the more familiar ones -- colds, flu, COVID, measles -- invade the host, make him/her sick, and eventually (with luck) are cleared from the body -- some of them leave behind remnants that can make their presence known later.  This behavior is what makes the herpes family of viruses so insidious.  If you've been infected once, you are infected for life, and the latent viral genetic material hidden in your cells can cause another eruption of symptoms, sometimes decades later (as I found out the hard way when I got shingles a couple of years ago).

Even weirder is when those latent viral remnants cause havoc in a completely different way than the original infection did.  There's a piece of a virus left in the DNA of many of us called HERV-W (human endogenous retrovirus W) which, if activated, can trigger multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia.  Another one, Coxsackie virus, has an apparent connection to type-1 diabetes and Sjögren's syndrome.  Thus far, all of the viral infections, whether or not they're latent, are damaging to the host.  So it was quite a shock to me to read a piece of recent research that there's a viral remnant that not only is beneficial, but is critical for intercellular communication -- and individuals without it have trouble forming long-term memories!

In two separate papers published in the journal Cell -- "The Neuronal Gene Arc Encodes a Repurposed Retrotransposon Gag Protein that Mediates Intercellular RNA Transfer" and "Retrovirus-like Gag Protein Arc1 Binds RNA and Traffics Across Synaptic Boutons," each by a large team of neurobiologists and geneticists -- we learn about the proteins Arc and Gag, which were put into our cells by retroviruses (probably) hundreds of millions of years ago, and which generate virus-like particles that transfer from one brain cell to another.  This process seems to mediate memory formation, as mice that have the Arc/Gag gene knocked out are unable to retain long-term memories -- and may even be unable to form them in the first place.

As Sara Reardon explained it, writing in Nature:

Shepherd and Budnik [lead researchers in the two studies] think that the vesicles containing Arc play a part in helping neurons to form and break connections over time as an animal’s nervous system develops or adapts to a new environment or memory.  Although the fly and mouse versions of Arc are similar, they seem to have evolved from two distinct retroviruses that entered the species’ genomes at different times.  "There must be something really fundamental about it," Budnik says, for it to appear in both mice and flies... 

The human genome contains around 100 Gag-like genes that could encode proteins that form capsids.  It’s possible that this new form of communication between cells is more common than we thought, Shepherd says.  "We think it’s just the beginning."

Which is pretty astonishing.  The idea that some viruses might have beneficial effects on the host is weird enough; the idea that they could facilitate something as basic as memory storage is mind-blowing.  As such, they'd be a major driver for evolution -- given that organisms that have strong memory capacity are clearly at an advantage over ones that don't.

So before you curse the viruses this winter, be a little thankful for Arc and Gag and any other genetic parasites we might have that help us to function.  It may be small consolation if you are currently fighting a cold, but keep in mind that without viruses, you might not be keep anything in mind at all.

****************************************

Life inside the snowball

Right now, here in the wilds of upstate New York, it's cold, gray, and snowy.  They say our area has a "four-season climate" -- but usually neglect to add that the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction.

On the other hand, if you know something about prehistory, it could be a whole lot worse, and in fact, has been more than once.  The last continental glaciation in this part of the world, the Laurentide, resulted in an ice sheet that buried the spot where I'm now sitting under three hundred meters of ice, and dug out not only the nearby Finger Lakes but the Great Lakes.  The southern edge of the ice sheet created the Elmira Moraine, only thirty miles south of me -- a moraine is basically the debris left behind when a glacier recedes -- and also Long Island, the sand and gravel soils of which were shoved forward as the ice sheet pushed southward then left in place, much like the pile of snow left when a snowplow backs up (explaining its long, narrow shape).

So I shouldn't complain about the cold.  The era of the Laurentide Glaciation was a lot colder.  And in fact, there have been periods in Earth's history where everyone, not just people like who live in the frozen north, would have been in the icebox.

Our knowledge of this rather miserable time in the far distant past has, like so many discoveries, built by accretion.  In the 1870s and 1880s geologists found evidence of widespread glaciation in strata in Scotland -- then, more puzzlingly, in Australia and India.  Any deep understanding of this was hampered by the fact that back then, scientists thought the continents were firmly fixed in place; continental drift wasn't even first proposed until 1912, and then was soundly rejected until magnetometer data proved in 1958 that the tectonic plates were in constant motion.  The first evidence of a worldwide glaciation -- not just a big one, like the Laurentide -- was uncovered in 1964 by Cambridge University geologist W. Brian Harland, who showed that glacial strata in Svalbard and Greenland had been deposited in tropical latitudes.  Thus demonstrating two rather amazing conclusions in one fell swoop; first, that Svalbard and Greenland had moved a long way, and second, that at the time when they were near the equator, the whole world was covered with ice.

This "Snowball Earth" model has since been demonstrated as accurate in multiple ways.  More than once, but most significantly between 720 and 580 million years ago (i.e. the end of the Precambrian Era), the whole planet was covered with a kilometers-thick sheet of ice.  Picturing what this was like is a little mind-boggling.  The glaciers covered not only the land, but the entire ocean.  Because the liquid water underneath was moving, the ice sheets broke up and ground together, much like the rocky tectonic plates do today, floating on the liquid mantle of the Earth.  Any organisms caught in the cracks of the ice sheet, or between the glaciers and the seafloor, would have been pulverized.  "It’s basically like having a giant bulldozer," said Huw Griffiths, of the British Antarctic Survey, in an interview with Eos.  "The next glacial expansion would have just erased all [traces of life] and turned it into mush, basically."

Griffiths is the reason the topic comes up, actually; he, Rowan Whittle (also of the British Antarctic Survey), and Emily Mitchell (of the University of Cambridge) are the authors of a paper in The Journal of Geophysical Research that looked at the rare fossils that have survived since that time, and have drawn some fascinating parallels to species who survive today in similar conditions -- on the seafloor beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheets:

The timing of the first appearance of animals is of crucial importance for understanding the evolution of life on Earth.  Although the fossil record places the earliest metazoans at 572–602 Ma, molecular clock studies suggest a far earlier origination, as far back as ~850 Ma.  The difference in these dates would place the rise of animal life into a time period punctuated by multiple colossal, potentially global, glacial events...  The history of recent polar biota shows that organisms have found ways of persisting on and around the ice of the Antarctic continent throughout the Last Glacial Maximum (33–14 Ka), with some endemic species present before the breakup of Gondwana (180–23 Ma)...  [D]espite the apparent harshness of many ice covered, sub-zero, Antarctic marine habitats, animal life thrives on, in and under the ice.  Ice dominated systems and processes make some local environments more habitable through water circulation, oxygenation, terrigenous nutrient input and novel habitats...  The recent glacial cycle has driven the evolution of Antarctica's unique fauna by acting as a “diversity pump,” and the same could be true for the late Proterozoic and the evolution of animal life on Earth, and the existence of life elsewhere in the universe on icy worlds or moons.

One group of weird animals they looked at, which apparently thrived in these harsh conditions, were frondomorphs (Phylum Petalonamae), which are thought to have left no descendants whatsoever, and whose alliances to other animals are uncertain at best.

Fossil of a Precambrian frondomorph, Charniodiscus arboreus, from the Flinders Range in Australia [Image licensed under the Creative Commons tina negus from UK, Charniodiscus arboreus, CC BY 2.0]

These peculiar beasts were apparently anchored to the seafloor and absorbed nutrients and oxygen from the frigid waters through the feathery bits, but honestly, we know barely anything about how they made a living.  Some may have -- as many Antarctic sponges and sea anemones do today -- been affixed upside-down from the underside of the ice sheet.

These animals, nicknamed "extremophiles" for obvious reasons, just about all died out when things warmed up and the ice finally melted.  But it bears mentioning how long the Snowball Earth conditions persisted -- around 140 million years.  In other words, about the same amount of time as between the end of the Jurassic Period and now.   During that time, there were minor ups and downs, temperature-wise, but that's still a huge expanse of time during which the Earth was an ice-covered wasteland.

When the snowball finally did melt, and the cold-loving extremophiles such as Charniodiscus went extinct, it opened the door for one of the major events in the history of life on Earth -- the Cambrian explosion, when all of the main phyla of animals evolved in a relative flash.  But even when conditions were at their worst, life still survived, somehow.  The fact that life can thrive in apparently hostile conditions improves our chances of finding it elsewhere in the universe, and cheers me up significantly with regards to the weather we're currently having here.

It's also further support for the famous line from the inimitable Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Life, uh, finds a way."

****************************************

My stars

The danger of posting something and saying, "Wow, how ridiculous is this claim?" is that my loyal readers take that as some kind of challenge, and I immediately get inundated with responses to the effect of, "You think that's weird, wait till you see this."

Now, don't misunderstand me; I love getting suggestions from my readers.  But it's a little disheartening to find out that however low my opinion of the collective intelligence of humanity gets, I still haven't struck the bottom.

Yesterday's post, about mysterious antennas appearing on public lands in Utah and people concluding (amongst other things) that they're being used by evil masterminds to control the weather, prompted a reader to respond, "Maybe all those antennas are just a way of jump-starting your DNA," along with a link to a site called "Starseed DNA Activation" that makes the weather modification people sound like Nobel laureates.

The "Starseed" thing sounded familiar to me, and after a little searching of the archives I found that I had indeed written something about this idea way back in 2011.  A Starseed, it turns out, is a person who thinks they're from another star system.  Some people think it's just their soul that's alien; others think they're literal, physical alien/human hybrids.  But the website the reader sent me yesterday goes way beyond that.

First, we learn how to tell if we're Starseeds, which of course I was curious to find out.  Here are the questions, along with my answers:

1. Do you feel disconnected from the people around you?  Given the fact that I raise social awkwardness to the level of performance art, that'd be a yes for me.
2. Does the general pattern of behavior in society not resonate with its essence?  I don't know if that one applies to me, because frankly, I can't figure out what the fuck the question even means.
3. Do the complexities of society, such as economics, cultural norms, conventional education, and religion seem foreign to you?  I think anyone who knows me would give me a thumbs-up on that one.
4. Do you have problems with authority figures?  That's another clear yes.  I've always felt like respect had to be earned, which is why my stint in Catholic school was short and unpleasant for all involved.
5. Do you have a deep interest in unusual subjects?  Cf. this entire damn blog.
6. Are you highly creative?  Given that I'm a novelist, musician, and sculptor...
7. Are you empathetic?  Definite yes on that one.
8. Do you understand that you had past lives not on this Earth?  Okay, here we're on shakier ground.  Hell, I thought that's what this test was intended to find out.  Or maybe I'm not understanding.
9. Do you have intense psychic and paranormal experiences?  Big nope on that one.
10. Do you have "crystalline DNA symptoms" -- ear popping, lucid dreaming, major chakras tingling, lightness in limbs?  Well, my ears pop sometimes, but probably no more than ordinary.  I've never lucid dreamed.  My limbs feel pretty ordinary, and I'm not sure I'd recognize a "tingling chakra" if it walked up and bit me on the ass.

So that's six "yes," three "no," and one "what the hell does that even mean?"  So clearly I'm a Starseed.  Cool beans.

Then we find out there are three different brands of Starseeds: "Sirian Starseeds" (characteristics: highly evolved spiritually, empathetic, spiritual leaders, enjoy the ocean), "Orion Starseeds" (characteristics: thorny relationships, sensitive, introverted, like to know stuff), and "Andromedan Starseeds" (characteristics: like to travel, flighty, late all the time, can get defensive).  What's funniest about this is the "Sirians" are supposedly from the system around the star Sirius (which is at least theoretically possible), while the "Orions" are from the whole constellation of Orion (even though it's made up of a bunch of separate stars all at huge distances from each other), and the "Andromedans" are from the entire fucking galaxy of Andromeda.  How you could be from a whole galaxy is never explained.  Maybe you have to be "highly evolved" to understand.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Salma2789, Spirit man, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Then we learn about evil beings called "organic portals" and "Archons" who are parasitic on the Starseeds and try to suck away their energy.  This made me think of the character of Colin Robinson, the "energy vampire" on the show What We Do In the Shadows, and that mental image made me take this website even less seriously.

Then we get into the "jump-starting your DNA" part.  I would try to paraphrase, but this whole section was so weird I just know you would think I'm making it up, so instead here is a direct quote on the topic:

In the eyes of the microscope, scientists discovered that there is a part of the DNA that is not visible.  Barely 3% is visible and is possible to be explored through science.  But 97% scientists classify it as junk or random material, which is the part of the non-visible DNA.  However, from the energetic eyes we perceive what this invisible part of DNA is and how to work it.

In this invisible DNA there is a lot of information that is part of our unconscious, of our ancestral memory and that has all the information of our experiences, our lives, our cycles, our egos, the fractals that are in other dimensions and everything we can experience as beings with soul.

And supposedly if you "open your heart and let the light frequencies in," you can awaken this 97% of your DNA that scientists apparently discovered by looking through a microscope, seeing nothing, and saying, "Hey, get a load of this!  I'm looking at invisible DNA, here!"

At this point, my brain went on strike and told me if I wanted to pursue this topic any further I was on my own and could fucking well go on without it.  So I decided to stop there.  But what I read was enough to cause me to bow down in awe to my loyal reader's bold claim that yes, there is something loonier than claiming random antennas in Utah are part of a 5G mind-control device.

But now that I've confirmed I'm a Starseed, I need to give some thought to what kind I am.  I'm thinking "Orion."  I definitely am not "Andromedan" because I hate being late, and the "Sirians" seem a little full of themselves, frankly.  I'm a little concerned about the "thorny relationships" part, but thus far Carol still puts up with me, so I guess I'm okay for the time being.

****************************************

Antennas up!

The woo-woo world is currently running about making excited little bleating noises because of a recent set of odd occurrences in Utah that are being widely labeled as "mysterious and unexplainable."

What's most amusing about this is that after calling them "unexplainable" they go ahead and explain them, although considering the content of some of the "explanations," using that word may be stretching the definition to the breaking point.  What's happened is that hikers in the foothills near Salt Lake City have stumbled across about a dozen antennas anchored to the ground, and at least a couple of them were connected to solar panels or locked battery boxes.  When local officials find the devices they remove them, but thus far no one has identified the person(s) responsible for installing them, nor determined what purpose they're intended to serve.

That lack of knowledge, of course, opens the door for people who follow up "no one knows what they're for" with "therefore I will proceed to tell you exactly what they're for."  So far, I've seen the following:

• They're part of a network of relays for evil masterminds to use for controlling the weather, which I guess is sorely needed now that HAARP shut down.
• They're a communication network for keeping in touch with our alien overlords.
• They're transmitters, to be used for mind-control signals to be beamed into the 5G microchips we all had implanted in us when we got COVID vaccines.
• Blah blah something something Area 51 something something.
• They were put there by (choose one: the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Saudis) to hack into our military networks and access top-secret strategic information.
• They're part of a cunning plan by the conservatives to keep tabs on the liberals, or vice versa, or possibly both at the same time.

Okay, will all you people just calm down for a moment?

So far, the only plausible explanation I've seen came from Salt Lake City Recreational Trails Manager Tyler Fonarow, who said the antennas might be "related to cryptocurrency and relaying networks and being able to make money off that."  Not only does that make at least some degree of sense, but he's the one who's in charge of removing the antennas when they're found, so he's actually seen the things, unlike virtually all of the people who think they're alien weather manipulation devices or whatnot.

Local officials are understandably perturbed at some person or persons using public land to install antennas, and would like it to stop regardless what purpose they're for.  "We just don't leave things on public lands anymore," Fonarow said.  "You have to ask for permission...  We want to stop it now before it becomes a dumping ground for dozens and dozens more antennas."

What I'd like to see stop is people taking a scanty handful of actual hard facts and then running right off the cliff with them.  Whatever the antennas turn out to be, I'd wager cold cash that the explanation won't be one of the ones in the bulleted list.  Which, of course, will discourage the woo-woos not at all.  They'll just hang their heads and shuffle their feet in embarrassment for about five minutes, then suddenly forget all about it and rush off bleating toward the next "mysterious and unexplainable" occurrences, apparently having learned nothing from the fact that they've been wrong the previous 1,284,926 times this has happened.

And the woo-woos call the rest of us "sheeple."

Anyhow, that's the latest from the conspiracy theorists.  Antennas in Utah.  Now, keep in mind that if I'm scoffing, it's probably only because the Bad Guys have activated the 5G microchip in my brain, and it's making me broadcast misinformation.  You know how that goes.

****************************************

Music of the heart

A couple of days ago I was in my car, listening to Sirius XM Satellite Radio's station Symphony Hall, and was delighted when one of my favorite pieces of music came on -- Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

What has always struck me as marvelous about this symphony is the contrast between the first and second movements.  The first movement is one of the most joyous pieces of music I know, a galloping romp that never fails to make me smile.  Then... the second movement begins.  It's quiet, dark, deeply melancholic, achingly beautiful.  It brings home what a genius Beethoven was, able to take us from one emotional extreme to the other in a heartbeat.

I've always reacted to music emotionally, ever since I was four years old and begged to be allowed to put my parents' vinyl records on the turntable and play them.  My mom, not trusting my capacity to handle them carefully, at first refused, but when it became clear that I would keep asking till I got my way, she finally caved and taught me how to operate it.

To my credit, I never so much as scratched a single record.  Even at that age, I recognized that they were far too precious to me to mishandle.  I did, however, play certain records over and over and over, undoubtedly making my mother question her decision to teach me how to use the record player.  Interestingly, I never had any interest in children's music -- not that my parents had much of that in any case -- the pieces I fell in love with as a child were Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Dvorak's Symphony #9: From the New World.  I remember being blown away when I was about twelve, and had a little portable AM/FM radio my grandmother gave me, and stumbled on the one radio station near where I lived that had a classical music program once a week.  I was idly flipping channels, and -- all of a sudden -- the opening chords of the first chorus of J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D came pouring out of the little speakers.

Three minutes later, when the piece ended, I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom with tears streaming down my face.  It was, truly, a transformative experience -- so much so that I worked it, very nearly verbatim, into my novel The Hand of the Hunter.

But I didn't know then, and still don't know, why some music resonates so strongly with me, and other pieces don't generate any emotional response at all.  I was spellbound when I discovered Stravinsky's Firebird when I was seventeen; it's still my very favorite piece of music.  On the other hand, I've heard music-loving friends rave about the symphonies of Brahms, and I can say unequivocally that I've never heard anything by Brahms that has ever generated more than a "meh" reaction from me.

Why?  I don't think anyone could answer that.

What is certain is that music is, for most of us, a deeply emotional experience.  And two studies that just came out this week support the conclusion that this response is very likely to be innate.

The first, which appeared in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is perhaps not that surprising.  It studied the stress levels and mood of over seven hundred volunteers, and found that listening to music improved mood and reduced stress, pretty much across the board.  Most hearteningly, the stress reduction was greatest in those who registered the highest stress levels before the study.

Like I said, nothing too earthshattering.  But the second is absolutely astonishing.  A paper in Psychological Studies showed that newborns, when played music judged by listeners as "happy" or "sad," responded differently -- and that it seems to be independent of tempo ("happy" music generally having a faster rhythm than "sad" music).  Newborns listening to the tunes judged as "happy" showed greater focus, calmer facial expressions, reduced heartbeat, and less movement of the hands and feet; "sad" music produced no such effect.

So the hallmarks of a happy piece of music -- things like being in a major key, less harmonic dissonance, and wide pitch contours -- are markers we either learn prenatally, or else are (amazing as it may seem) hard-wired into our neural network.

I said earlier that this was "astonishing," but honestly, it shouldn't be.  Like I said, I've responded emotionally to music for as long as I can recall, and although my parents had a decent collection of records, neither of them played an instrument (nor made any real efforts to expose me to music).  Whatever capacity I had for music appreciation was already there somewhere.  And the fact that the link between emotion and music is so innate is pretty incredible.  I have to wonder what evolutionary purpose it serves.  We certainly get a lot of information about others' emotional states through the pitch contours of their speech; think about what it sounds like when an actor portrays a "robotic voice," for example.  The contours flatten out, leaving behind a monotonous, mechanical stream of words.

But is this really what drives our emotional response to music?  It's only a guess.  What's certain is that the current research explains why for so many of us, music is a critical piece of our lives -- something we return to again and again for solace, comfort, and emotional release.

****************************************

Orphan stars

Here in the twenty-first century, it's easy to deride the ancients for their belief that the Earth was the center of the cosmos, and everything revolved around it.

After all, that's certainly what it looks like.  We still talk about the Sun "rising" and "setting" -- even though we know the Earth orbits the Sun, the terms are a convenient way to describe our experience.  (Well, to be absolutely accurate, the Earth and the Sun both orbit their common center of gravity, but the Sun is so much more massive that to say the Earth orbits the Sun is substantially accurate.)

Even after Copernicus showed that the heliocentric model is correct, it still left us to explain the apparent motion of the stars.  As we gradually learned more, we found that we are far from the center of the universe; we orbit a rather ordinary star in the outer reaches of a rather ordinary galaxy.  It still boggles my mind that they figured this last part out.  Not only are we at the periphery of the Milky Way, and therefore seeing it edge-on, a lot of the bright central bits are obscured by dust.  But even so, we've now amassed enough data to understand that the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, and even to map out its main features.

If ever there was an image you need to study in detail, this is it.  Take a look at the original, close up.  The Solar System is in the Orion Arm, directly down from the center of the galaxy.  The thing that blew me away is the circle marked "Naked Eye Limit" -- literally every star you have ever seen without the use of a telescope is in that little circle.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Pablo Carlos Budassi, Milky way map, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And if you want to feel even smaller, the Milky Way is just one of a hundred thousand galaxies in the Laniakea Supercluster, which stretches over a distance of 520 million light years.  And weirdest of all, the entire supercluster's center of gravity is at a point called "the Great Attractor," but we can't see what's there because it's on the other side of the Milky Way's center.  If there's actually something there holding the entire Laniakea Supercluster together, it's currently hidden, and will be for another hundred million years -- at which point the Solar System will have made a half-revolution around the Milky Way and will be able to see what, if anything, is out there.

The reason this topic comes up is a recent survey by the Hubble Space Telescope that found good evidence that there are stars -- and therefore probably associated planetary systems -- out there in the space between the galaxies.  It picked up "intracluster light," a faint glow produced by these unaffiliated stars.  What was fascinating and unexpected is that when you look at progressively more distant regions of space -- and thus, back further in time -- the amount of that ghostly glow doesn't change, which implies that earlier models attributing these orphan stars to the chaos resulting from galactic mergers or close side-swipes can't be true.  It looks like there have always been stars floating out there between galaxies.

Think about what it'd be like to live on a planet around one of those.  Remember the circle on the map marked "naked eye limit?"  Within the naked eye limit of a planet around one of those orphans, there would be nothing.  The skies would be pitch black... until the telescope was invented.  And then, what a surprise they'd get!  (If they'd even think of inventing the telescope -- why would you, when it appears that there's nothing up there to see?)

"We don't exactly know what made [the orphan stars] homeless," said astrophysicist James Jee of Yonsei University, who co-authored the study.  "Current theories cannot explain our results, but somehow they were produced in large quantities in the early universe.  In their early formative years, galaxies might have been pretty small and they bled stars pretty easily because of a weaker gravitational grasp."

More data should come in from the newly-deployed James Webb Space Telescope, and that may clarify this fascinating conundrum.

The ancients found it unsettling that we might not be at the center of the universe, and later that the universe is astonishingly larger than they ever dreamed.  Me, I find it reassuring.  My own little petty day-to-day concerns and worries seem like nothing at all on the scale of the Laniakea Supercluster.  Looking up on the next clear night, remember that little circle marked "naked eye limit" -- and think about what there is up in the night sky that you're not seeing.

Including the ghostly light of millions of orphan stars, lost in the deeps of interstellar space.

****************************************