Дава Собел – The Planets (страница 2)
Even though Pluto remained unexplored, deemed too distant and too difficult to visit, its own unexpected moon was discovered accidentally in 1978, through careful analysis of photographs taken by ground-based telescopes. Had my daughter, born in 1981, attempted her own diorama of the revised and expanded Solar System when she turned eight, she would have needed handfuls of jellybeans and jawbreakers to model the many recent additions. My son, three years her junior, might have opted to model his on our home computer.
Despite the increased population of the Solar System, its planets stayed stable at nine, at least until 1992. That year, a small, dark body, independent of Pluto, was detected on the Solar System’s periphery. Similar discoveries soon followed, until the total number of diminutive outliers grew to seven hundred over the ensuing decade. The abundance of mini-worlds made some astronomers wonder whether Pluto should continue to be regarded as a planet, or reclassified as the largest of the ‘trans-Neptunian objects’. (The Rose Center has already excluded Pluto from the planetary roll call.)
In 1995, only three years after the first of Pluto’s numerous neighbours was found, something even more remarkable came to light. It was a bona fide new planet – of another star. Astronomers had long suspected that stars other than the Sun might have their own planetary systems, and now the first one had surfaced at 51 Pegasi, in the constellation of the flying horse. Within months, other ‘exoplanets’- as the newly discovered extra-solar planets were quickly dubbed – turned up at stars such as Upsilon Andromedae, 70 Virginis b, and PSR 1257+12. At least 180 additional exoplanets have since been identified, and refinements in discovery techniques promise to uncover many more in the near future. Indeed the number of planets in our Milky Way Galaxy alone may far exceed its complement of one hundred billion stars.
My old familiar Solar System, once considered unique, now stands as merely the first known example of a popular genre.
As yet, no exoplanets have been imaged directly through a telescope, so their discoverers are left to imagine what they look like. Only their sizes and orbital dynamics are known. Most of them rival giant Jupiter in heft, because large planets are easier to find than small ones. Indeed, the existence of exoplanets is deduced from their effect on their parent star: Either the star wobbles as it yields to the gravitational attraction of unseen companions, or it periodically dims as its planets pass in front and impede its light. Small exoplanets, the size of Mars or Mercury, must also orbit distant suns, but, being too tiny to perturb a star, they elude detection from afar.
Already planetary scientists have appropriated the name ‘Jupiter’ as a generic term, so that ‘a jupiter’ means ‘a large exoplanet’, and the mass of an extremely large exoplanet may be quantified as ‘three jupiters’ or four. In the same fashion, ‘an earth’ has come to represent the most difficult, most desirable goal of today’s planet hunters, who are devising ways to probe the Galaxy for petite, fragile spheres in the favoured shades of blue and green that hint at water and life.
Whatever daily concerns dominate our minds at the dawn of the present century, the ongoing discovery of extra-solar planetary systems defines our moment in history. And our own Solar System, rather than shrink in importance as one among many, proves the template for comprehending a plethora of other worlds.
Even as the planets reveal themselves to scientific investigation, and repeat themselves across the universe, they retain the emotional weight of their long influence on our lives, and all that they have ever signified in Earth’s skies. Gods of old, and demons, too, they were once – they still are – the sources of an inspiring light, the wanderers of night, the far horizon of the landscape of home.
* In his ingenious pamphlet, ‘The Thousand-Yard Model, or, The Earth as a Peppercorn’, Guy Ottewell guides the construction of a scale model Solar System using a bowling ball for the Sun. The eight-thousand-mile-wide Earth, here reduced to a peppercorn, takes its rightful place seventy-eight feet (!) from the bowling ball.
‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,’ the first book of the Bible recounts. ‘And the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.’
The energy of God’s intent flooded the new heaven and earth with light on the very first day of Genesis. Light’s potent good thus pervaded the evenings and the mornings when the seas separated from the dry lands, and the earth brought forth grass and fruit trees – even before God set the sun, moon and stars in the firmament on the fourth day.
The scientific Creation scenario likewise unleashes the universe in a burst of energy from a void of timeless darkness. About thirteen billion years ago, scientists say, the hot light of the ‘Big Bang’ erupted, and separated itself instantly into matter and energy. The next three minutes of cooling precipitated all the atomic particles in the universe, in the unequal proportions of 75 per cent hydrogen to 25 per cent helium, plus minuscule traces of a few other elements. As the universe expanded exponentially in all directions and continued to cool, it shed no new light for at least a billion years – until it begat the stars, and the stars began to shine.
New stars lit up by pressuring the hydrogen atoms deep within themselves to fuse with one another, yielding helium and releasing energy. Energy fled the stars as light and heat, but helium accumulated inside them, until eventually it, too, became a fuel for nuclear fusion, and the stars melded atoms of helium into atoms of carbon. At later stages of their lives, stars also forged nitrogen, oxygen and even iron. Then, literally exhausted, they expired and exploded, spewing their bounty of new elements into space. The largest and brightest stars bequeathed to the universe the heaviest of elements, including gold and uranium. Thus the stars carried on the work of Creation, hammering out a wide range of raw materials for future use.
As the stars enriched the heavens that had borne them, the heavens gave rise to new generations of stars, and these descendants possessed enough material wealth to build attendant worlds, with salt seas and slime pits, with mountains and deserts and rivers of gold.
In its own beginning, some five billion years ago, the star that is our Sun arose from a vast cloud of cold hydrogen and old stardust in a sparsely populated region of the Milky Way. Some disturbance, such as the shock wave from a nearby stellar explosion, must have reverberated through that cloud and precipitated its collapse. Widely dispersed atoms gravitated into small clumps, which in turn lumped together, and kept on aggregating in an ever-quickening rush. The cloud’s sudden contraction raised its temperature and set it spinning. What had once been a diffuse, cool expanse of indeterminate shape was now a dense, hot, spherical ‘proto-solar nebula’ on the verge of starbirth.
The nebula flattened into a disk with a central bulge, and there in the heart of the disk the Sun came to light. At the moment the Sun commenced the self-consumptive fusion of hydrogen in the multi-million-degree inferno of its core, the outward push of energy halted the inward gravitational collapse. Over the ensuing few million years, the rest of the Solar System formed from the leftover gas and dust surrounding the infant Sun.
The Book of Genesis tells how the dust of the ground, moulded and exalted by the breath of life, became the first man. The ubiquitous dust of the early Solar System – flecks of carbon, specks of silicon, molecules of ammonia, crystals of ice – united bit by bit into ‘planetesimals’, which were the seeds, or first stages, of planets.
Even as they assembled themselves, the planets asserted their individuality, for each one amassed the substances peculiar to its location in the nebula. At the hottest part, flanking the Sun, Mercury materialized from mostly metallic dust, while Venus and Earth matured where rocky dust as well as metal proliferated. Just past Mars, tens of thousands of rocky planetesimals availed themselves of plentiful carbon supplies, but failed to amalgamate into a major planet. These herds of unfinished worlds, called ‘asteroids’, still roam the broad zone between Mars and Jupiter, and their territory, the ‘Asteroid Belt’, marks the Solar System’s great divide: on its near-Sun side lie the terrestrial planets; on the far side, the frigid gaseous giants grew.
The planetesimals at greater distances from the Sun, at lower temperatures, assimilated stores of frozen water and other hydrogen-containing compounds. The first one to reach appreciable proportions then attracted and held on to great quantities of hydrogen gas, and thus grew into Jupiter, the mammoth planet whose mass doubles that of all the others combined. Saturn, too, aggrandized itself with gas. Farther out from the Sun, where dust proved even colder and scarcer, planetesimals took longer to develop. By the time Uranus and Neptune had achieved sufficient mass to pad themselves with hydrogen, the bulk of that gas had already dissipated. At Pluto’s remove, only rock shards and ices could be had.