So much work over the dark months on this website, such a proliferation of words and pages—possibly too much, or at least too much for me to manage simultaneously. I’m going to wind down updating this journal and focus my efforts elsewhere. I’ve been pondering a replacement using ActivityPub, which would also replace my current Twitter and Mastodon accounts. But we will see.
I’ve written previously about the Artemis program, and I was quite excited to see the Artemis II crew announced. One of the four astronauts on this mission to the moon is Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian, who will become the first ever from my country to do so. Neat.
In other space news, the Hubble Space Telescope detected a remarkable anomaly that has been identified as a possible black hole, ejected from its galaxy and pulling a trail of stars along with it. The press release reads:
There’s an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long “contrail” of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It’s likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.
As astronauts prepare to leave our atmosphere, this invisible monster has me thinking once again about the “potent nothing” of space, the infinite void that constitutes the background of our understanding, that supersaturated abyss of signification. Some light material to get me through spring cleaning.