Sunday, April 18, 2010

Binary Star System SS433 and its purple doppler shift and why I care

I took astronomy in college. It was the only science course I "got," after nearly flunking high school chemistry. Miss Hart started making me come to chemistry class 3 times a day, because I was just that dense. I brought all my stuffed animals with me to the exam (I was in 11th grade, but had no pride even then) and still only managed to squeak by with a D-. Somehow, after a couple of college astronomy classes, I was able to "ace out" of an advanced biochemistry class my senior year of college. Suddenly, my intuitive brain was able to connect the dots, tie the macrocosmic universe to microcosmic particles and begin understanding how they work. My tripped out brain began to ponder the expansion of the universe (into what?) and the multi-dimensional questions of perception. My exploration of space in the classroom dovetailed with my exploration of the boundaries of my own perspective back in the dormroom.
Building off my experience observing the wonderful classic Incredible Shrinking Man - in the end he shrinks so small, he's infinitely big -- and having been born an Aries, on the cusp of Pisces, I've always been interested in how the beginning is really the end. As an english major, I had read Sir Thomas Browne's Religio de Medici where the mirroring of the macrocosmic and the microcosmic merges with Man himself as the connection. But here in advanced biochemistry from an astronomic perspective I saw the way the layers of chemicals in a star, for example, mirror, well, sort of, the valence shells of an atomic particle and how this mirroring pattern was repeated on all sorts of levels, oh ok, just call it physics, but think about it like microscope . . . and then the physical questions pop into mind, like, if the universe is expanding, where does it expand to? And it just seems to me that here, again, the microcosmic/macrocosmic relationship reveals an answer. Hell, I am not sure if it is the right answer, but is the universe expanding into itself? Is it going back to where it began? Or maybe it is expanding into another dimension of itself . . . like the big going into the small. The there coming back around to the here. I know the astronomers today say the mass equations they perform mean the universe will continue to expand, not retract back in on itself like a giant rubber band. It will keep expanding until everything is far far away from everything else and it's all cold and empty . . .but even in that, somewhere, I find some hope that in that state of absolute distance, the universe will be all one again. I don't know. It's just a feeling. Because the empty cold universe seems kind of lonely. I can't imagine the universe being all cold and distant and alone. The stars may gradually disperse from the cosmic party, but they'll be heading home. . . I mean, I've got to believe that the shape of the universe didn't preexist the universe, so it's all expanding to someplace it created itself or at least someplace that is part of itself. And maybe a cold distant lonely universe is part of itself but I don't really think everything will really be distant, I think it will all be connected, by invisible filaments, all part of the same living universal body.
And then, here's the thing. SS433 got me thinking. It's got a purple doppler shift because it is spewing matter in two directions and the matter is getting sucked into the binary star system's black hole. Doppler shifts show us light going in one direction, away from us, as longer light waves, when the light source is moving away from us, is red and when it is moving toward us, it has a shorter wavelength -- or higher frequency -- and appears blue. So then here's SS433, with its purple doppler shift because the source of the light is moving in opposite directions simultaneously. And then I wonder about the shorter lightwaves eventually getting so short they are infinitely long lightwaves, and there at that moment where the long turns into short, oh, there's the purple...