What dark forms
b.lurk in the mists of the Carina Nebula?
The question (and the image) belong to NASA. There are, however, other questions worthy of consideration, none of which require attribution.
Until the 1830s, so the story goes, poor Eta Carinae, who resides in the aforementioned nebula, was an ordinary, undistinguished star, another frail, anonymous mote of faraway heat and light. But she began to glow more and more brightly as each month passed over the course of that decade until in 1843, a year that started on a Sunday, she erupted and continued to erupt, gloriously, for twenty years, becoming the second brightest star in the sky. Then in 1863—not all at once but in slow, woeful spurts—she faded from view. (Those dark clouds you see in the image above are plumes of dust from her eruption.) Which means that if you had died, for instance, in the Crimean War, you might have lain on your back, at Sebastopol, for instance, and stared up at gorgeous glowing Eta, and focused all your pain and fear on her, and never imagined that ten years later she, like you, would be gone. Or if you were born, say, on the eve of John Brown's raid and took your first breath in the back of a cart en route to the midwife's, still miles away, and your own screams and your mother's screams and the ruts in the road and the cold of the night so alarmed you in your excruciating littleness that you opened your eyes and saw great big Eta up there burning away, the brightest and boldest thing this corner of the universe had going, by the time you learned to spell her name, she would have been gone. What happened?
"The most popular hypothesis proposes that the star's luminosity becomes so great that it overpowers the effects of gravity that hold the star together."
This seems to me a cautious, even puritanical view: that there are limits to luminosity. What other possibilities remain? Why did she leave us? Why did she burst? I repeat: "What dark forms lurk in the mist of the Carina Nebula?" Are they dark at all or are our senses limited, inverted, poor? What's so dark about darkness after all? Does Eta Carina mourn her faded splendor? Did she even know of her involvement in that strange bright lawn we call a "sky"? Will she arrive at the door late one morning? Or will she knock at the window late one night? Will she be tired? Does small talk offend her? Does she find intimacy alarming? Will she prefer a certain kind of tea? What about a week of sundays? Would a year born on a week of a sundays be seven years long, every day of it a Sunday? And if you lived through it would you age seven years or one, or just a single day?
Wait, listen, this is the good part: Eta Carinae is getting bright again, and brighter every day.
Look at her now!
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