on the bigness of some things
I think what drew me to astronomy as a kid was the sheer size of everything; the bigness of it all. Proxima Centauri is a small, low-mass star located 4.2465 light-years away from the Sun in the southern constellation of Centaurus, says Wikipedia. One light year is about 9.46 x 10¹² kilometers. I have an intuitive sense of what one kilometer feels like; it is roughly the distance between my house and the supermarket I frequent. I envision this distance in my head and then I multiply it– twice, thrice, five times, ten times. After a while, as the distance grows, I can feel it start to slip from my mind because I’m approaching the limit of what my imagination is capable of. One light year is so monstrously large a number that no distance from my human experience can possibly be used to visualize it.
In April 2020, the very first image of black hole was released. It’s actually a very unremarkable looking picture– a mushy black circle with a blazing golden and orange halo. The black hole in question, M87, is 55 million light years away and weighs about 6.5 billion solar mass. The heaviest object my mind can meaningfully use as some kind of unit weight an elephant. One solar mass is about 2 x 10³⁰ kg, or about 5 x 10²⁵ elephants. It’s more elephants than my brain can imagine being squished up and condensed into a black hole. I have no idea what 6.5 billion solar mass could feel or look like– it’s just a number on the screen.
There is a deep feeling of awe and majesty when I think about the bigness of some things. The so-muchness of the ocean, the sun, the stars and space itself is overwhelming, but also humbling. On my 18th birthday, I got a tattoo of Voyager-1 on my right ankle, as a reminder of the bigness of the universe. There are lots of incredible things about Voyager-1 but one of my favourite is an iconic image it took on Valentine’s Day, 1990. Dubbed the ‘Pale Blue Dot’, this image is from a series of Family Portraits of the solar system Voyager-1 took that day. You can see the earth, a barely-perceptible white dot, against the backdrop of space; the entirety of human history, my own history, condensed into a single pixel and for a moment, I feel like my life is simultaneously the most significant and insignificant thing in the universe.
This article was originally published in Ether Magazine. Thank you to the folks at Ether for their help.
