In all the years I’ve been talking about astronomy, I’ve always told people there was no such thing as a dumb question. And I meant it. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to come up with ’em though. Today’s deep question comes to us courtesy of my niece Oriana, who said she heard this one on TV: “How many corn dogs does it take to fill up a black hole?”
Well, Oriana, I bet you thought I wouldn’t try to answer that because it was too dumb. Truth to tell is you probably can’t come up with an exact number of how many corn dogs it would take to fill up a black hole, because, well… because the obvious answer is that you can’t fill up a black hole. The buggers just keep swallowing things up, getting bigger and bigger all the time. They’re weird animals that way. You can chuck all the corn dogs in that black hole that you want, and it’ll just keep sucking them down. Yeah, it’s a trick question, but what do you want from an advertising copywriter who probably thought it was a cute “astronomy” thing to ask in an ad about trucks?
You wanna know more about black holes? I have a scintillating discussion on my web page that invokes Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, and the Hubble Space Telescope. Go over here and read it and then come back here and leave me a comment if you think there’s another way to answer the corn dogs-in-a-black-hole question!
A year ago we vacationed in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico for a couple of days. One of our goals was to hike out to the site of a pictograph drawn on a rock overhang that is said to depict the appearance of a supernova that occurred in 1054 A.D. The artist was part of the Anasazi group of people who populated this canyon during that time, and much archaeoastronomical debate centers on just what it meant for the artist to paint the scene.
It must have been an eerie sight when the explosion flared into view over the eastern horizon early on July 4, 1054 A.D. Perhaps it had some ritual meaning to the Anasazi. Or maybe it was just their way of recording a strange thing in the sky. We’ll never know, but that doesn’t stop learned astronomers and ethnographic types from tussling over what the rock record means. One thing’s for sure, the presence of a bright “guest” star must have been a surprise to ancient stargazers who knew the skies quite well. Certainly the Chinese and Japanese thought it so remarkable that they recorded it in their writings, and there’s even evidence that people living on Guam noticed this outburst and drew pictures of it on cave walls. But, apparently, few in Europe saw fit to record this apparition, although it would have been quite bright in their skies.
A Crab Nebula finder chart (right-click to download a fullsize version)
Can we see the supernova today? Well, yes, sort of. It has faded quite a bit from the glory days of 1054 A.D. when it rivaled the full moon for brightness. To see it with any detail you need a medium-to-large backyard-type telescope and maybe even a filter or two. It’s definitely not a binocular object but if you want to just see where the Crab lies, look toward the horns of Taurus the Bull after they rise up out of the horizon clutter on these November nights. The southern horn of the Bull extends out to a star called Zeta Tauri. The Crab lies just above that star.
VLT view of the Crab Nebula
Of course, observatory scopes are really good at digging into the heart of the Crab and showing us the spectacular details of this explosion. Here are two of my favorites: the first is from the European Southern Observatory and the second is a combined Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory image:
HST and Chandra view the heart of the Crab Nebula
I often wonder what the ancient Chinese, Japanese, and Anasazi peoples would think if they only knew just what it was they were recording on their parchments and sandstone? For them, this sight was a mysterious one — another symbol of something in the sky that they didn’t understand. But they surely appreciated the beauty of the apparition — just as today we look at it and try to comprehend the stellar forces at play in the death of a supermassive star.
