Cosmos (37 page)
Authors: Carl Sagan
Thermonuclear reactions in the solar interior support the outer layers of the Sun and postpone for billions of years a catastrophic
gravitational collapse. For white dwarfs, the pressure of the electrons, stripped from their nuclei, holds the star up. For neutron stars, the pressure of the neutrons staves off gravity. But for an elderly star left after supernova explosions and other impetuosities with more than several times the Sun’s mass, there are no forces known that can prevent collapse. The star shrinks incredibly, spins, reddens and disappears. A star twenty times the mass of the Sun will shrink until it is the size of greater Los Angeles; the crushing gravity becomes 10
10
g’s, and the star slips through a self-generated crack in the space-time continuum and vanishes from our universe.
Black holes were first thought of by the English astonomer John Mitchell in 1783. But the idea seemed so bizarre that it was generally ignored until quite recently. Then, to the astonishment of many, including many astronomers, evidence was actually found for the existence of black holes in space. The Earth’s atmosphere is opaque to X-rays. To determine whether astronomical objects emit such short wavelengths of light, an X-ray telescope must be carried aloft. The first X-ray observatory was an admirably international effort, orbited by the United States from an Italian launch platform in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Kenya and named Uhuru, the Swahili word for “freedom.” In 1971, Uhuru discovered a remarkably bright X-ray source in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, flickering on and off a thousand times a second. The source, called Cygnus X-1, must therefore be very small. Whatever the reason for the flicker, information on when to turn on and off can cross Cyg X-1 no faster than the speed of light, 300,000 km/sec. Thus Cyg X-1 can be no larger than [300,000 km/sec] × [(1/1000) sec] = 300 kilometers across. Something the size of an asteroid is a brilliant, blinking source of X-rays, visible over interstellar distances. What could it possibly be? Cyg X-1 is in precisely the same place in the sky as a hot blue supergiant star, which reveals itself in visible light to have a massive close but unseen companion that gravitationally tugs it first in one direction and then in another. The companion’s mass is about ten times that of the Sun. The supergiant is an unlikely source of X-rays, and it is tempting to identify the companion inferred in visible light with the source detected in X-ray light. But an invisible object weighing ten times more than the Sun and collapsed into a volume the size of an asteroid can only be a black hole. The X-rays are plausibly generated by friction in the disk of gas and dust accreted around Cyg X-1 from its supergiant companion. Other stars called V861 Scorpii, GX339-4, SS433, and Circinus X-2 are also candidate black holes. Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a supernova
whose light should have reached the Earth in the seventeenth century, when there were a fair number of astronomers. Yet no one reported the explosion. Perhaps, as I. S. Shklovskii has suggested, there is a black hole hiding there, which ate the exploding stellar core and damped the fires of the supernova. Telescopes in space are the means for checking these shards and fragments of data that may be the spoor, the trail, of the legendary black hole.
A helpful way to understand black holes is to think about the curvature of space. Consider a flat, flexible, lined two-dimensional surface, like a piece of graph paper made of rubber. If we drop a small mass, the surface is deformed or puckered. A marble rolls around the pucker in a orbit like that of a planet around the Sun. In this interpretation, which we owe to Einstein, gravity is a distortion in the fabric of space. In our example, we see two-dimensional space warped by mass into a third physical dimension. Imagine we live in a three-dimensional universe, locally distorted by matter into a fourth physical dimension that we cannot perceive directly. The greater the local mass, the more intense the local gravity, and the more severe the pucker, distortion or warp of space. In this analogy, a black hole is a kind of bottomless pit. What happens if you fall in? As seen from the outside, you would take an infinite amount of time to fall in, because all your clocks—mechanical and biological—would be perceived as having stopped. But from
your
point of view, all your clocks would be ticking away normally. If you could somehow survive the gravitational tides and radiation flux, and (a likely assumption) if the black hole were rotating, it is just possible that you might emerge in another part of space-time—somewhere else in space, some when else in time. Such worm holes in space, a little like those in an apple, have been seriously suggested, although they have by no means been proved to exist. Might gravity tunnels provide a kind of interstellar or intergalactic subway, permitting us to travel to inaccessible places much more rapidly than we could in the ordinary way? Can black holes serve as time machines, carrying us to the remote past or the distant future? The fact that such ideas are being discussed even semi-seriously shows how surreal the universe may be.
We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometers away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of nuclear fire? The Sun warms us and feeds us and
permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience. Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun,
*
and they were far from foolish. And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.
The Galaxy is an unexplored continent filled with exotic beings of stellar dimensions. We have made a preliminary reconnaissance and have encountered some of the inhabitants. A few of them resemble beings we know. Others are bizarre beyond our most unconstrained fantasies. But we are at the very beginning of our exploration. Past voyages of discovery suggest that many of the most interesting inhabitants of the galactic continent remain as yet unknown and unanticipated. Not far outside the Galaxy there are almost certainly planets, orbiting stars in the Magellanic Clouds and in the globular clusters that surround the Milky Way. Such worlds would offer a breathtaking view of the Galaxy rising—an enormous spiral form comprising 400 billion stellar inhabitants, with collapsing gas clouds, condensing planetary systems, luminous supergiants, stable middle-aged stars, red giants, white dwarfs, planetary nebulae, novae, supernovae, neutron stars and black holes. It would be clear from such a world, as it is beginning to be clear from ours, how our matter, our form and much of our character is determined by the deep connection between life and the Cosmos.
*
It had previously been thought that the protons were uniformly distributed throughout the electron cloud, rather than being concentrated in a nucleus of positive charge at the center. The nucleus was discovered by Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge when some of the bombarding particles were bounced back in the direction from which they had come. Rutherford commented: “It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch [cannon] shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”
*
The spirit of this calculation is very old. The opening sentences of Archimedes’
The Sand Reckoner
are: “There are some, King Gelon, who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude: and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily, but also that which is found in every region, whether inhabited or uninhabited. And again, there are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough to exceed its multitude.” Archimedes then went on not only to name the number but to calculate it. Later he asked how many grains of sand would fit, side by side, into the universe that he knew. His estimate: 10
63
, which corresponds, by a curious coincidence, to 10
83
or so atoms.
*
Silicon is an atom. Silicone is a molecule, one of billions of different varieties containing silicon. Silicon and silicone have different properties and applications.
*
The Earth is an exception, because our primordial hydrogen, only weakly bound by our planet’s comparatively feeble gravitational attraction, has by now largely escaped to space. Jupiter, with its more massive gravity, has retained at least much of its original complement of the lightest element.
*
Stars more massive than the Sun achieve higher central temperatures and pressures in their late evolutionary stages. They are able to rise more than once from their ashes, using carbon and oxygen as fuel for synthesizing still heavier elements.
†
The Aztecs foretold a time “when the Earth has become tired …, when the seed of Earth has ended.” On that day, they believed, the Sun will fall from the sky and the stars will be shaken from the heavens.
*
Moslem observers noted it as well. But there is not a word about it in all the chronicles of Europe.
†
Kepler published in 1606 a book called
De Stella Nova
, “On the New Star,” in which he wonders if a supernova is the result of some random concatenation of atoms in the heavens. He presents what he says is “… not my own opinion, but my wife’s: Yesterday, when weary with writing, I was called to supper, and a salad I had asked for was set before me. ‘It seems then,’ I said, ‘if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar, oil and slices of eggs had been flying about in the air for all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad.’ ‘Yes,’ responded my lovely, ‘but not so nice as this one of mine.’ ”
*
1 g is the acceleration experienced by falling objects on the Earth, almost 10 meters per second every second. A falling rock will reach a speed of 10 meters per second after one second of fall, 20 meters per second after two seconds, and so on until it strikes the ground or is slowed by friction with the air. On a world where the gravitational acceleration was much greater, falling bodies would increase their speed by correspondingly greater amounts. On a world with 10 g acceleration, a rock would travel 10 × 10 m/sec or almost 100 m/sec after the first second, 200 m/sec after the next second, and so on. A slight stumble could be fatal. The acceleration due to gravity should always be written with a lowercase g, to distinguish it from the Newtonian gravitational constant, G, which is a measure of the strength of gravity everywhere in the universe, not merely on whatever world or sun we are discussing. (The Newtonian relationship of the two quantities is F = mg = GMm/r
2
; g = GM/r
2
, where F is the gravitational force, M is the mass of the planet or star, m is the mass of the falling object, and r is the distance from the falling object to the center of the planet or star.)
*
The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The Aztec word for god was
Teotl
, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called the Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.
THE EDGE OF FOREVER
There is a way on high, conspicuous in the clear heavens, called the Milky Way, brilliant with its own brightness. By it the gods go to the dwelling of the great Thunderer and his royal abode … Here the famous and mighty inhabitants of heaven have their homes. This is the region which I might make bold to call the Palatine [Way] of the Great Sky.
—Ovid,
Metamorphoses
(Rome, first century)
Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was He before creation?… How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression … Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.
And it is based on the principles …
—The Mahapurana (The Great Legend),
Jinasena (India, ninth century)
Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened—the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know.
That
it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density—a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures—perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all. It was not that all the matter and energy were squeezed into a minor corner of the present universe; rather, the entire universe, matter and energy and the space they fill, occupied a very small volume. There was not much room for events to happen in.
In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased. It is misleading to describe the expansion of the universe as a sort of distending bubble viewed from the outside. By definition, nothing we can ever know about
was
outside. It is better to think of it from the inside, perhaps with grid lines—imagined to adhere to the moving fabric of space—expanding uniformly in all directions. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum—from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated. As time passed, the fabric of space continued to expand, the radiation cooled and, in ordinary visible light, for the first time space became dark, as it is today.