In this comparison, an apparently ordinary star field in optical light (above) is shown to be dramatically different when observed in X-rays (below). Chandra’s image of 3C438, the central galaxy within a massive cluster, reveals evidence for one of the most energetic events in the local Universe.

Following last month’s proving-inspired addition of a new article to the site (Does it matter?) which, among other things, suggests that black holes are massless, an interesting discovery has been reported by NASA.

“Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence for an “awesome upheaval” in a massive cluster of galaxies. A bright arc of ferociously hot gas extending more than two million light years requires one of the most energetic events ever detected.”

“The huge feature we detected in the cluster combined with its high temperature (170 million°C) points to an exceptionally dramatic event in the nearby Universe,” says Ralph Kraft of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of a team of astronomers involved in this research. “While we’re not sure what caused it, we have narrowed it down to a couple of exciting possibilities.”

“There is no reality in the absence of observation.”
Neils Bohr & Werner Heisenberg

Two possible explanations are offered. Either a collision between two large galaxies or a supermassive black hole. The observed data favours the latter explanation since there is only a single source for the massive emission of energy. The really interesting part comes right at the end.

“If this event was an outburst from a supermassive black hole, then it’s by far the most powerful one ever seen,” says team member Bill Forman, also from the Center for Astrophysics.

The phenomenal amount of energy involved implies a very large amount of mass swallowed by the black hole, about 30 billion times the Sun’s mass consumed over a period of 200 million years. The authors consider this rate of black hole growth implausible.

“These values have never been seen before and, truthfully, are hard to believe,” notes Kraft. Until these issues are sorted out, the awesome upheaval remains a mystery.

A radio map of 3C438 reveals jets spewing from the galaxy’s core – a sign of explosive activity.

It is indeed highly implausible that a black hole could have ‘swallowed’ such an incredible amount of matter, but then the whole idea of black holes swallowing and compressing matter to the extent suggested by the prevailing theory is rather implausible to begin with. It’s good to see that astrophysicists have now been brought to the point where a re-evaluation of present theory is apparently being demanded by this discovery.

“All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward internal dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”
H P Lovecraft

“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.”
Jorge Luis Borges

The additional development to the black-hole model (see Holed in One) has got me on a roll and I’ve been reflecting on the nature of mirrors in the last few days. It seemed that the various insights that various provings have been bringing in over the last year or so needed to be brought together in a kind of meta-theory that would be capable of modelling the entire shebang and be consistent with the quest for the  whole elephant. This whole thing is starting to shape up into something approaching a book on the subject, and may yet turn into one. Watch this space …

The critical thing about mirrors is, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains in his introduction to the principles of Dzogchen (Dzogchen: Heart Essence of the Great Perfection), “When you see a reflection of a form in a mirror, the reflection appears within the mirror but it is not projected from within.”

So common questions such as “why do mirrors reverse left-to-right but not up-to-down?” are really asking the wrong question. Mirrors don’t actually “do” anything. They just reflect. It’s we who do all the doing in our interpretation of the image we see. Mirrors appear to reverse left-right because we, in standing vertically viewing them, are interpreting the image we see as if it were being projected from within the mirror, in which case the object in the mirror appears to be rotated about the vertical plane and hence reversed left-to-right (and also front-to-back if we interpret the mirror-image as three-dimensional). The fact that the reversal doesn’t appear to be up-to-down is simply because we see the reversal as occuring relative to the vertical plane. If we rotated our imaginary object in the mirror about the horizontal plane, the reversal would appear to be up-to-down.

If we make this elementary interpretive error when confronted with a two-dimensional panel which we know to be reflective, what hope for us correctly interpreting all that comes at us from “out there” in three, even four, dimensions, while being unaware of the reflective nature of it all? It thus becomes highly plausible to countenance the prospect that all our explorations, models and rationalisations about the world outside ourselves are back to front and inside out, most particularly that daft notion that matter is primary and gives rise to consciousness as a secondary phenomenon.

Does this mean we need to deconstruct all our models of existence and start again? Not at all. We merely need to turn them inside out. So, for instance, the extraordinary gravitational forces of a black hole don’t arise from the collapse and implosion of a star, but the collapse of a star occurs when its gravitational forces become too great to sustain its material manifestation. Thus the emperor stands without his clothes, a victim of his own spin, revealing his naked energetic dimensions for us all to reflect upon the nature of our own state.