Mother Sun (a theory)

 by Shaun Lawton

   I am a creative writer and an amateur astronomer without a telescope.  Here's my poetic idea I like to refer to as the Organic Supposition of Planet Formation (as opposed to the standard gravitational theory and alternative conjectures such as the recently posited electrical theory of planetary formation).  In my organic hypothesis, our local star produces all the planets, birthing them like seeds.  Over epochal periods of time, they gradually (indiscernible to our mayfly-like existences) move farther and farther away from their stellar mother...each one eventually replacing the spot formerly occupied by their elder sibling. It’s a straightforward premise which I don’t believe has been ruled out as of yet.  

   This proposition would offer one reason how Mars now contains traces of evidence for life that may have once flourished back in time when it formerly occupied the space Earth currently does; and furthermore, it may clarify how all the spat-out and spent "planet-husks" end up as plutinos and twotinos, etc., arriving into the vast scattered disc and Kuiper belt, eventually to culminate in the planetary graveyard comprising the Oort Cloud. In this hypothesis, Earth itself is destined to take the place of Mars. Then, after passing through the remnants of the asteroid belt, it eventually undergoes the celestial transmutation into its “Jupiter-phase,” the first of four gas-giant developmental stages.

    I speculate that at this chapter of our organic and fourth-dimensional evolution, the planetoids our Sun gives birth to begin to develop the various intervals of their hydrogen/helium atmospheres, which invariably pass through Saturn's state, Uranus's stage, and finally, after reaching Neptune's glorious, frozen apotheosis, they are destined to complete their considerable and immense mortality and join Pluto (in its “hospice stage,” if you will) and then the inevitable termination – to be ejected into the graveyard of hundreds of thousands of planets our local star has spawned and will continue to for as long as it remains fertile. This speculation is one of the reasons why I think of the Oort Cloud as a sort of inverse eggshell; because it signifies the epochally formed exterior of the cosmic mausoleum being built even while we live and breathe here on Earth during this tertiary stage of our first trimester of celestial emergence.    

On Being

 by   shaun lawton

   We must all strive to share a mutual perspective on the fecundity of the question "Is there any such thing as alien life?"  If our own ideas of where we stand on the great cosmic scale of existence were to expand themselves to consider our home as being merely identified as the greater set of the entire universe, then all life within said parameters might suddenly become not so alien to us, after all.   We should each be able to see that the question of *whether or not* there is alien life out there and *what* it might be are indeed two separate and thorny questions, and our situation here seems to be in the habit of lumping them together as if they were one and the same.  Ah,  "To be, or not to be..."

     When we participants of this discussion all agree to stick with the spirit of the question, and then decide we mean "any sentient species that happens to exist upon other planets", we put ourselves in the position wherein we may necessarily exclude the term "alien" in favor of "extraterrestrial;" it depends on whether or not our DNA is being shared (setting aside for the moment what our definition of "sentient" happens to be).  Because if we cannot be compelled to agree on what the spirit of the question is in the first place, it renders this topic nearly obsolete in terms of conducting a rational discussion about it.  For instance, one possible outcome of this debate about extraterrestrial life is that our own species may end up being discovered to actually be indigenous to the whole Universe, for all we know.  This example might render all technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in our cosmos to be bipedal by nature and homo sapiens by definition. 

     The spirit of this question then becomes an integral consideration in our guesswork of not only what the true nature of the so-called "alien" might actually be, but also our own true nature in the context of all creation.  It renders the meaning of the term "alien" with the caveat that it must then define something truly separate from us, in the sense that it may not even share our DNA(!), or even not be of this universe at all(!?).   

    And as some of us are already beginning to suspect, our existence may in fact be an aspect of a singularity. These perspectives become crucial for us to keep in mind when defining life itself and our universe.   If you ask me, the very fact we are still struggling with (and on different pages of) our own explanations for life and our place in the universe itself renders any discussion on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence all the more challenging. At this stage of our comprehension of the universe around us, I often suspect it is ourselves who are being more effectively searched for, and not the other way around.  Unless, perhaps, the universe is like some strange game where we must first lose ourselves in order to then begin the search all over again...

 

 

The Great Attractor

 by  Shaun Lawton (roving reporter for the Oscillating Oculus). 

   "Does a pie sliced into 14 unequal pieces even feel the knife that sectioned it?  It's a trick question, since the Great Attractor balances out our whole life."  

   The Great Attractor is the apparent central gravitational point of the Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies which includes the Milky Way as well as about 100,000 other galaxies.  Lanieakea is part of the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex, which itself can be described as a galaxy filament, the largest known structures in the universe.  These galactic filaments are massive, thread-like formations that function like dividing walls forming the boundaries between voids (also known as "dark spaces").   These dark spaces or voids contain very few if any galaxies, because the vast majority of galaxies remain gravitationally bound together forming galaxy filaments.   Most of these "void pockets" are between 10 and 100 megaparsecs in diameter (30 to 300 million light years) and even larger ones are referred to as supervoids.  

   The observed attraction (of the Great Attractor) suggests a localized concentration of mass on the order of ten-quadrillion solar masses. However, it is somewhat hidden from our view by the Milky Way's galactic plane, lying behind the Zone of Avoidance ("ZOA"). It turns out that the Great Attractor is difficult to observe directly in visible light wavelengths.  (The attraction itself is observable by its effect on the motion of galaxies and their associated clusters over a region of hundreds of millions of light-years across the universe). 

   To be clear, these galaxies are observable above and below the Zone of Avoidance; yet all of them are redshifted in accordance with the Hubble flow, indicating that they are receding relative to the Milky Way and to each other, but the variations in their redshifts are large enough and regular enough to reveal that they are slightly drawn towards the attraction. 

   These variations in their redshifts are known as "peculiar velocities", and cover a range from about +700 km/s to −700 km/s, depending on the angular deviation from the direction to the Great Attractor.

   What's interesting to know, is that the Great Attractor itself is moving towards the "Shapley Supercluster", and furthermore, recent astronomical studies by a team of South African astrophysicists have revealed that in the Great Attractor's theorized location lies a supercluster of galaxies known as the "Vela Supercluster."  

   The Shapley Supercluster appears as a striking overdensity in the distribution of galaxies in the constellation of Centaurus, itself located 650 million light years away from us.  It is the largest concentration of galaxies in our nearby universe that forms a gravitationally interacting unit (therefore appearing to be pulling itself together rather than expanding with the universe).  

   The Vela Supercluster is even farther away from us (at a distance of about 870 million light years) and is thought to be within the vicinity of the Zone of Avoidance, itself centered on the constellation Vela.    *

*to be  (or not to be) cont.