God's Final Message To His Creation

The Carina Nebula is a cloud of gas, hydrogen, helium, dust, and other assorted nonsense that surrounds an open cluster of stars. (An open cluster is a whole bunch of stars formed by the gravitational collapse of the same molecular cloud. It’s a bit like how monozygotic twins are born, if that helps.) The nebula features Eta Carinae, one of my favorite stars. Of course, my all-time favorite star is Sol. Another star I like is IK Pegasi, because it is only 150 light years away and is a barely detectable white dwarf star that, at any minute now, can go supernova. This would release so much gamma radiation that it would cause the nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere to oxidize into Nitrogen Oxide (NO₂), which would summarily rip the ozone layer to shreds; of course, that really won’t matter because before the NO₂ does any of that, it would mix with water vapor to form Nitric Acid, which would rain from the sky. That also won’t matter because we’ll all be dead by that point, either from radiation or from being in an atmosphere that’s 80% NO₂.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Eta Carinae. It’s 8,000 light years away, 150 times more massive than the sun, and five million times as bright. It is, and I cannot tell you how proud I am of this pun, a stellar badass. In April 1843, astronomers noticed that this star had become really, really bright. Aboriginals in Australia said it was the wife of War. For a while it was the 2^nd brightest star in the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere. That burst of brightness was because Eta Carinae had gone supernova. A supernova, to the uninitiated, is the single most powerful explosion that can ever happen. Think of it this way: If you take ALL the energy that the sun has ever released in its 4.6-billion-year lifespan, and release that energy in 1 second, you get a Supernova. If you like numbers, there's a nifty table for you.

Event:	Amount of energy released (approx.):
Sachin Tendulkar hitting a six	100 J
Tsar Bomba, the world’s most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested	100,000,000,000,000,000 Joules (1017 J)
A Supernova	10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules (1046 J)

And it survived. That’s right; Eta Carinae survived the most powerful explosion possible within the laws of physics. It still glows there (or doesn't; we'll know in the next 8000 years if it collapsed into a black hole, or went supernova again and died, or even went supernova again and survived again). But this story of Eta Carinae is a favorite of mine. I like looking at photos of it. Unfortunately, you can only see it from the Southern Hemisphere, so I’ll have to wait until my Antarctic expedition before I can see it in the night sky. Eta Carinae is inside the Carina Nebula; which was extensively photographed in 1999 by the Hubble Space Telescope.



Photography is a funny thing, and astronomical photography is not that dissimilar to terrestrial photography. One afternoon in New York City, Joel Brodsky was taking photographs of a rock group. After a few group shots, he started to take individual photographs. He knew that the group’s lead singer was going to be the focus of this, so Joel decided to save the individual shots of the singer for the end of the session, and was taking photos of the other guys instead. Bored, the singer began to drink. By the time it was his turn, the singer was plastered and Joel didn’t get as many photos as he would’ve liked. It didn’t matter though, because he took one photograph that would go on to define what it means to be a rock-star, and inspire me to grow my hair long when I was 15.

Like all the other great photo-shoots of human history, no one at the time knew that one of the photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope was going to be one of most defining images of human history, and has almost made me recant my atheism and start believing in God. It’s not the “landscape” photo of the Carina Nebula, which is an astonishing photograph in itself; you can’t look at it without Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ playing in your head.

THE picture (the one for which I've used nearly a thousand words, 3 photographs, a table, references to chemistry, rock music, photography, and -in my first draft- politics, to build up...) is a close-up of a portion of the Carina Nebula known as the Keyhole Nebula. This photograph has made me susceptible to believing in God again simply because it proves that the only way I feel it is possible to reconcile the reality of the universe we live in and the idea that it’s all the creation of an omnipotent deity is that the deity is apathetic. Or to put it mildly, it proves my belief that if God exists, he’s a fucking asshole.

(Look to the top-left to see what I'm on about)