GinohnNews
<< REWIND |
27 APRIL 2006 |
FORWARD>> |
HAIKU MOVIE REVIEWS
PICTURES
G: Weather has been nice.
I've been running and doing yard work. I raked some leaves yesterday.
My pal D-Dave from college is in town for a conference. He came over in
the morning when he got in and hung around until I had to go to teach a
class. John came home for lunch and we all went to the New Deal Cafe.
It was the first time I'd had lunch there since they opened the
expansion. It was nice to sit in there with all the windows.
Last Thursday I went on my first Franklin's ride of the season. It
was me, Rich, and Alfredo. TVTom would have ridden with us but his
chain broke on the way to our house so he drove and met us there. Rich
bolted ahead while Alfredo and I took some shortcuts. We figured he
must have been ahead of us the whole time, but wasn't there when we got
there. He arrive a couple of minutes later and said he'd tried some
other "shortcuts" that turned out to be dead ends. Lori went to
Florida for the weekend, to visit Jonathan. She was bringing home 25
movie dvds in a sleeve case and checked her bags. The dvds did not
arrive with her bags. We are waiting to see what Jet Blue has to say
about that.
J: Gina and I also went for a
nice walk with Skip through the lovely Brookside Gardens
and their environs last Sunday. Lots of flowers, pleasant weather, and
good conversation. Stay tuned to this page for pictures.
One thing that perplexes astrophysicists a bit is the way spiral
galaxies seem to hold their shapes longer than expected, without
twisting up like tightened watch springs. But instead of looking for a
watchmaker who's on vacation or something, scientists look for other
explanations. Extra mass in the galaxies - mass that we can't see with
telescopes - might account for faster orbits of stars (like ours) that
are farther out in the galaxies' arms. Since we can't find this matter
(yet), scientists have dubbed it Dark Matter, and calculated that there
is a heck of a lot of it out there, much more than the matter we can detect (stars and nebulae).
I have this wacky theory, though, that doesn't rely on dark matter to
keep galaxies true to form. By wacky theory, I mean that I have no
calculations behind it, or ways to test it or disprove it. It's really
just an idea, OK? Anyways, here it is:
Most, if not all, spiral galaxies are known to have supermassive black
holes at their centers. This includes our own Milky Way, which has a
black hole that holds a mass of almost 4 million suns, and still
hungers for more.
This supermassive black hole is no doubt spinning very quickly, and
producing gravity waves that, while they can't be detected by us (yet),
have an interesting "herding" effect on the stars that orbit the
galaxy. Our Sun, for example, orbits the Milky Way once every 200
million years, but it also surfs ahead of its otherwise mundane
gravitational path, riding on the gravity waves of the huge whirlpool
that it circles.
Neat, huh? Remember, you read about it here first. And if you read
about it somewhere else, that means it's not just one of my wacky
theories, it's a good wacky
theory.