Book Dinosaurs

KINTSUGI

I learned kintsugi so I could fix my favorite broken mug.⁣

The art that meant golden joinery,⁣

Golden repair.⁣

But I never thought about what it meant.⁣

Why would I? I fixed my mug.⁣

⁣

Until I broke,⁣

Until I saw cracks within people that I love.⁣

That was the moment I realized⁣

Kintsugi isn't just for fixing ceramics⁣

It is not to say what didn't kill you made you stronger.⁣

It is to show what didn't kill you is now a part of your story.⁣

A significant piece of who you are.⁣

For better or worse,⁣

whether it made you stronger, weaker, or traumatized,⁣

It's. Still. You. ⁣

⁣

So we pick up the broken pieces of ourselves and the ones we love⁣

And we put it back together with golden glue,⁣

As best as we can.⁣

We assure our loved ones not to conceal their scars⁣

We promise them the glued parts aren't ugly.⁣

That the cracks are now like a golden vein,⁣

a vein through which ichor flows.⁣

The same ichor that Gods bled is now,⁣

Keeping us immortal for a while.⁣

Black Holes: Seeing the Invisible!

Black holes are some of the most bizarre and fascinating objects in the cosmos. Astronomers want to study lots of them, but there’s one big problem – black holes are invisible! Since they don’t emit any light, it’s pretty tough to find them lurking in the inky void of space. Fortunately there are a few different ways we can “see” black holes indirectly by watching how they affect their surroundings.

Speedy stars

If you’ve spent some time stargazing, you know what a calm, peaceful place our universe can be. But did you know that a monster is hiding right in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy? Astronomers noticed stars zipping superfast around something we can’t see at the center of the galaxy, about 10 million miles per hour! The stars must be circling a supermassive black hole. No other object would have strong enough gravity to keep them from flying off into space.

Two astrophysicists won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for revealing this dark secret. The black hole is truly monstrous, weighing about four million times as much as our Sun! And it seems our home galaxy is no exception – our Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that the hubs of most galaxies contain supermassive black holes.

Shadowy silhouettes

Technology has advanced enough that we’ve been able to spot one of these supermassive black holes in a nearby galaxy. In 2019, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole in a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light-years away. They used an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope.

In the image, we can see some light from hot gas surrounding a dark shape. While we still can’t see the black hole itself, we can see the “shadow” it casts on the bright backdrop.

Shattered stars

Black holes can come in a smaller variety, too. When a massive star runs out of the fuel it uses to shine, it collapses in on itself. These lightweight or “stellar-mass” black holes are only about 5-20 times as massive as the Sun. They’re scattered throughout the galaxy in the same places where we find stars, since that’s how they began their lives. Some of them started out with a companion star, and so far that’s been our best clue to find them.

Some black holes steal material from their companion star. As the material falls onto the black hole, it gets superhot and lights up in X-rays. The first confirmed black hole astronomers discovered, called Cygnus X-1, was found this way.

If a star comes too close to a supermassive black hole, the effect is even more dramatic! Instead of just siphoning material from the star like a smaller black hole would do, a supermassive black hole will completely tear the star apart into a stream of gas. This is called a tidal disruption event.

Making waves

But what if two companion stars both turn into black holes? They may eventually collide with each other to form a larger black hole, sending ripples through space-time – the fabric of the cosmos!

These ripples, called gravitational waves, travel across space at the speed of light. The waves that reach us are extremely weak because space-time is really stiff.

Three scientists received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for using LIGO to observe gravitational waves that were sent out from colliding stellar-mass black holes. Though gravitational waves are hard to detect, they offer a way to find black holes without having to see any light.

We’re teaming up with the European Space Agency for a mission called LISA, which stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. When it launches in the 2030s, it will detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes – a likely sign of colliding galaxies!

Rogue black holes

So we have a few ways to find black holes by seeing stuff that’s close to them. But astronomers think there could be 100 million black holes roaming the galaxy solo. Fortunately, our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide a way to “see” these isolated black holes, too.

Roman will find solitary black holes when they pass in front of more distant stars from our vantage point. The black hole’s gravity will warp the starlight in ways that reveal its presence. In some cases we can figure out a black hole’s mass and distance this way, and even estimate how fast it’s moving through the galaxy.

For more about black holes, check out these Tumblr posts!

⚫ Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

⚫ Hubble’s 5 Weirdest Black Hole Discoveries

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Finding that one scene in a book that you love to read again and again because you just can’t get over it is the best part of reading in my opinion

“Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes (But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.)”

—

Arthur Rimbaud, 

Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat)

I read between the lines when I can't write.!!😶

ONLY THING I'll be thinking about for next few business days 

disquiet

A piece of me is always missing, Like the last block of lego that I can never seem to find One empty space right in the center of the jigsaw puzzle. I'm not sure if I lost it along the way. I'm not sure if I'm yet to find it. But lately, the gap seems more blatant. I'm anxious that it's visible to the people around me. That when they look at me, they see half a person. It's almost like I'm mimicking a being While I'm on the quest for the missing elements.

Sometimes, everything is wholesome! Golden skies, daisies, moongazing, Dusty libraries where ghosts of dead poets linger, Tight hugs, acts that mean "I'm thinking of you.", I look at my picture with my friends, smiling ear to ear And the jigsaw puzzle is complete. (or it was, then.) Some memories in me are so perfect that, The missing lego piece starts to feel like an extra piece From the table, you're trying to put together. It works fine without it, and there's nowhere to put it.

Then I'm back in my bed, back in my head. And I cannot remember how to be a whole person again I eat chocolate until I'm nauseated Or I never draw the curtains open and let the light flow through. I want to live life to the fullest, I never want to be seen in public again, I want all-consuming love, I want to believe I'm worthy of it, I want to feel complete when I'm alone, I want someone to feel complete with.

I want and I want and I want… Socrates said, (Yes, I went there) "He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have." What about, She who is never content with who she is? What about me?

Digital Age.

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a cage

Or should I call it #theDigitalAge ?

And I must tell you, it's loud in here.

I see and hear everyone too much.

Being called out by memes, and

Feeling left out on trends.

Photoshop making grass a little greener

While I filter out my blues.

I send you LOL with a straight face,

Use "Panic" as my wordle guess,

You see my carefully curated stories,

Unaware of the ones I hide from you.

Trained to fake a smile

Faster than the shutter speed.

While living like the protagonist

Of Franz Kafka's dairy adaptation.

Tired of looking through this glass cage.

Aren't you sick of this Digital Age?

Oh, Who am I kidding! You've already moved on,

To double-tap the next thing.

FLOWERS AND SCARS

The flowers you once gave

Are now my bookmarks.

Dried and black,

Yet somehow artful.

Like the scars, you left behind

To bookmark

The person I was, and have become.

Dried and black,

Yet somehow hurtful.

(13.11.20)

For a second or two

Sometimes I fall in love with strangers,

For a second or two or some more.

Not for the thrill or dangers,

For the kindness, simplicity, and whatnots.

That someone on a park bench

Petting a random dog,

And then someone by the swing

Helping a kid back to her feet.

That someone at the next table

Smiling genuinely at the waiter,

And then someone at the handwash

Holding the door for an old woman.

I fall in love with strangers,

A second for how they look,

Two for their generous smile,

And some more for the random act of kindness.

The universe conspires you around such strangers

At that particular point in time out of all.

Because kindness conjures love.

Even if it's from a stranger.

A stranger,

Who will stop what they're doing

To fall in love with you.

For a second or two or some more.