Our Milky Way Galaxy Vibrates Like a Drum

According to astronomers, our Milky Way galaxy is warped and vibrates like a drum because of the influence of two companion galaxies. Astronomers say peculiar drum-like vibrations in our Milky Way galaxy may explain why it is warped, and similar explanations may apply for other warped galaxies. The researchers said the effect is due to the most prominent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies, a pair of galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds. They are stirring up with the Milky Way's dark matter, an invisible substance that is thought to make up more then 90 percent of the weight of the universe. The interaction creates a warp in the galaxy that has puzzled astronomers for half a century. The warp, most obvious in the thin disk of hydrogen gas permeating the galaxy, extends across the Milky Ways 200,000-light year width. A light year is the distance light travels in a year.

Leo Blitz, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues charted this warp and analyzed it in detail for the first time, based on a new galactic map of light given off by the  hydrogen gas. They found the gas layer is vibrating like a drumhead, and that the vibration consists almost wholly of three notes, also called modes. These notes would be unimaginably deep by human standards some three million octaves, or scales, below the note called middle C on a piano. This means that if a piano could play these notes, it would require a keyboard about the width of Iceland to do so.

It's not uncommon for astronomical objects to exhibit some sort of regular vibrations, like musical instruments, so that they can be said to be playing notes. Which note depends on the vibration speed. A study last summer found that a violent quake on the surface of a compact type of star called a neutron star left it playing the note of F sharp.

Although the Milky Way's warp has been known for almost 50 years, astronomers previously dismissed the Magellanic Clouds as its cause because the galaxies combined masses are only 2 percent that of Milky Way. This mass was thought too small to influence a massive disk equivalent to about 200 billion suns during the clouds 1.5 billion-year orbit of the galaxy. But Martin D. Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts joined Blitz to create a computer model that takes into account the Milky Ways dark matter. The motion of the clouds through the dark matter creates a wake that enhances their gravitational influence on the disk. The wake stirs a vibration at the center of the dark matter blob pervading the galaxy. This in turn makes the embedded galactic disc oscillate. When this dark matter is included, the Magellanic Clouds, in their orbit around the Milky Way, closely reproduce the type of warp observed in the galaxy. The model not only produces this warp in the Milky Way, but during the rotation cycle of the Magellanic Clouds around the galaxy, it looks like the Milky Way is flapping in the breeze.

"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a landmark new book by British archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber, who was a London-based author, anarchist activist and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. Graeber was the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent."

The Dawn of Everything offers a dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality -- and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. In its early chapters, the book proposes that the European Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries was actually, in great measure, a response to the Indigenous philosophies that Colonists and Imperialists had come into contact with in the New World of North America. Ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy did not exist in Medieval Europe. Ever since then, the Western mind has been moving closer, in these areas, to Native American views. As the authors point out, our ideas about human freedom, democracy, and sexual equality are much closer to that of an Indigenous person of the 16th Century than they are to the European Catholic view.

One of the main propositions that Graeber and Wengrow put forth in The Dawn of Everything is that the ancestors of our prehistory were not simple, ignorant savages, but rather self-conscious, idiosyncratic social organizers, evolving through a "carnival parade of political forms." Today we might use words like anarchist, communist, authoritarian, or egalitarian to describe their activity, but that language fails to represent the sheer quirkiness of the actual case studies: large cities without central authorities or farming (Göbekli Tepe), tribal nations spanning entire continents (Cahokia), and social housing projects (Teotihuacan).

 

Some populations would even alternate their social systems on a seasonal basis. For example, the Plains tribes of North America formed into an organized political community under one government during the seasonal bison hunt. There was a police force and squads of warriors with full coercive powers. If anyone endangered the success of the hunt, they could be punished, imprisoned, or even killed. The people who occupied those enforcement roles rotated from year to year. These coercive institutions did not last beyond the period of the hunting and ritual Sundance season. During the rest of the year, these Plains societies would split off into smaller groups which had entirely different social systems where people would have to resolve disputes through processes of deliberation and debate.

 

For 40,000 years, people have been moving between various forms of equal and unequal social structures, building up hierarchies and then dismantling them. The authors make the case that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies were considerably more so. How did we get stuck?

One of the key arguments of the book is its stance against a reductionist view of our current circumstances: its insistence that the first 300,000 years of human history offer a past that is more varied, hopeful and altogether more interesting than what we have interpreted it to be, and that the same might be true of our future. Our species has been creating new ways of living in all the diverse ecosystems on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. We have the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality, so why not exercise it. We have done all this before. We can do it again. The book's optimism, in the face of impending climate doom, political polarization, and social upheaval, is itself a provocation to act.

Remembering Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

The beloved teacher, civil rights activist, and pioneer of engaged Buddhism died on January 22 at midnight (ICT) at his root temple, Tu Hieu Temple, in Hue, Vietnam. He was 95. Hanh suffered from a severe brain hemorrhage in 2014, which left him unable to speak, and had been living at Tu Hieu Temple. After the Plum Village Community, Hanh’s sangha, announced his passing, followers, dharma teachers, and world leaders, including the Dalai Lama, immediately started sharing remembrances and condolences.

Nhat Hanh entered a Buddhist monastery at age 16, devoting his life to the faith. He became a teacher, first leaving Vietnam in 1961 to serve as a guest lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University. Nhat Hanh returned to Vietnam in 1963 to work toward peace during the long and violent war that raged in his homeland, bringing aid to the people and urging North and South Vietnam to work together to end the war. When Nhat Hanh left Vietnam again in 1966 to tour the world calling for peace, his home country banned him from returning.

Exiled from Vietnam, Nhat Hanh became a powerful symbol of peace, nominated by Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He established the Plum Village Monastery in southwest France and began spreading his teachings throughout the West. Nhat Hanh wrote dozens of books guiding readers toward peace and mindfulness, and he made Buddhism accessible by suggesting that inner peace can be achieved through living an ordinary life with awareness of things like breath and joy. It was the beginning of the mindfulness movement, and Nhat Hanh attracted Western followers who were less interested in traditional Western religion but loved the spirituality they found in his teachings. Mindfulness grew to become a popular 21st century practice. Nhat Hanh became known as Thay, Vietnamese for teacher.

Nhat Hanh first returned to Vietnam in 2005, almost 40 years since his exile began. He traveled the country and published several of his books in Vietnamese, though he received criticism for not speaking out against religious oppression in the country. Nhat Hanh returned for another tour in 2007. In 2018, after suffering a stroke in 2014 that left him unable to speak, Nhat Hanh went to Vietnam a final time, with the intention of living his final days at Tu Hieu Temple, where he first took his vows.

 

Photo by Duc Truong. Source: Legacy.com.