12.09.2003 - 3:12 p.m.

This entry will probably only mean anything to you if :

a) you are musically inclined

b) you have a wide-eyed fascination about the wonder of the observed universe

c) you have an imagination

I realise that's killed off everyone who may read the Words from my Brain, but to those of you who are left, get yer thinking caps around this.

In the middle of galaxies are black holes, this is now an accepted fact by the astronomical fraternity and observatories like Chandra can prove it ( here's a Doppler signature of a black hole and here's a Pretty picture of the event horizon of a Black hole) If a galaxy wasn't big enough, they can also group together into Clusters and more often than not, if there's a lot of galaxies in a relatively small area they all huddle together in a Supercluster, pooling their gravity wells and I would guess eventually merging their individual black holes into one great big fuckoff matter drain. The Supercluster in mind is the Perseus Cluster and if you haven't already read it from the link, here's the science. The energies surrounding this little party have created huge pressure waves which ripple out through the gas and matter, they've calculated from the appearance of the waves that the sound being generated is 57 octaves below B-flat above middle C, I'm just waiting now for someone who knows about octaves and stuff to explain that to me ( hint hint )

If you're still with me and haven't fallen asleep, here's a comparison of scale, our solar system is about 7.5 billion miles across, not too big astronomically but if you struggle getting to the shops at the bottom of the road, don't even think about leaving the Earth. Light however, being a bit more sprightly than the average fat bastard thinks nothing of skipping across our solar system in about 11 hours ( I think, my maths could be a bit suspect here but that's the answer I keep getting ), hurrah for it. The SuperCluster mentioned earlier is a bit bigger and light, even with it's seven league boots on can't get from one side to the other in less than a few million years, if it gets across at all.

Nothing like putting a trip to the shops in perspective.