We are Stardust… (or My Mummy is a Black Hole)

Scientists now believe that not only are black holes not particularly rare or distant objects, but in fact we have one as a (relatively in cosmic terms) close neighbour; and not any old black hole, No Sir! This is a super massive black hole. That would be deeply scary stuff, this unstoppable monster sucking all matter into its voracious maw… just down the Milky Way from us. However, it turns out there are two phases of a black hole’s life span, an active one (when it does gobble up everything) and a passive one where it just kinda sits there, being a good neighbour. To give you some sense of scale, this thing is equal to .5% of the mass of the whole galaxy, and it is 3 billion times as large as our sun, and ‘just’ 25,000 light years away.

The scientists now believe that these super-massive black holes have a fundamental part to play in the creation of our galaxies. They suck in gas clouds and condense them down into solid matter that eventually becomes new stars. So they are the birthplace of our Universe. Given that all matter on Earth comes from the detritus of failed stars, including mankind, then they are literally our cosmic womb!

“We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden” Joni Mitchell

So, the Universe has at its heart a huge black hole that is the creative force behind Creation. We are a little like that too. On the surface all this rationality and organisation, and within every one of us is a seething, roiling mass of insecurity, fears and doubt. When we deal with each other at the surface level only we have limited effectiveness, and we gain little satisfaction. Once we look a little deeper and see both the ‘stardust’ and the ‘black hole’ we can touch each other in magical ways.

So today, put away your telescopes and look a little deeper… act on that and see what happens!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 08:04 and is filed under General, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.