At a distance of about 1,500 light years, the Orion Nebula is one of the closest star formation regions to Earth. This makes Orion -- a favorite for amateur astronomers and casual sky watchers -- an excellent location to study how stars are born and behave during their stellar childhoods. In this composite image, the central region of Orion is seen as never before through NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope.
The bright point-like sources (blue) in this image are the burgeoning stars captured in X-ray light by a long series of Chandra observations.
These nearly continuous observations, lasting almost 13 days, allowed astronomers to monitor the activity of Sun-like stars between 1 and 10 million years old. The fledgling stars were seen to flare in their X-ray intensity much more than our Sun does today. This suggests our Sun had many violent and energetic outbursts when it was much younger. The wispy filaments (pink and purple) are clouds of gas and dust as seen by Hubble in optical light. This gas and dust will one day condense into disks of material from which future generations of stars will be born.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E. Feigelson et al. Optical: NASA/STScI
From: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photos07-109.html
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Morning, the second day.
Having not heard from Aeneas, Sophia waited apprehensively. Whatever happens, she pondered, we will learn more about the Supervisor and this Place. It is not reasonable that we continue on without knowing a plan or goal. Are we supposed to develop one of our own? We want to go home to watch over our great-grand children. What happens to the others who do not arrive? Are they the fortunate ones who are allowed to sleep eternally while we continue on?
The Narrator almost smiled. This is heard rolling over and over in the human minds. People expect to be told what to do when deep down they understand the general expectations and move on from those. One well known existential question is ‘What can we hope for?’ and a levelheaded response is that ‘our children should be able to live more humanely than their parents’.
Whose children? Why a should when a must will more easily do? How is live defined? How is humanely defined? What do the parents gain by this responsibility?
We are given the gift of Free Will after death as well as before. How much free will do we allow ourselves individually as well as within the group? How much did we allow in life? The survival of our group comes first because it is necessary for the better survival of our children and our grandchildren. Why are we given Free Will when we have parental and group responsibility yoked to it? We are born, we grow, we have children, our children have children. If we are fortunate we die with individual and in group dignity somewhere along that chain.
We thought if we were not free in life then we would be free in death but that is not the case in this Place. We ruminate and find camaraderie through our personal identities, personalities and interests. The human center is Our Mother, the first who was allowed in this Place. She is our common point. We are equal citizens through our ancestry. We have become a hive of silhouetted sensible questions buzzing back through the many cousins, searching for equally silhouetted reasonable responses. What else can we do? The gods certainly don’t help. We don’t know if they ever helped.
Generally, more emotionally laden questions resolve themselves through a deeper inner study. The question, Who am I? is more easily resolved after life than Why am I here? What shall I do here? How much can I know and understand of my role and responsibility in this Place? How do I resolve each and all of these issues?
These are the deeper questions the Dead deal with. It is no wonder time is taken away from them so they may rest and think and resolve, first as a member of the group of Dead, then second as a fully human individual consciousness with personality and memory from life. These are enough questions concern these individuals and their small group of five in relationship to what they must do, what actions they must take when confronting the Supervisor who is as a god like no other, Necessity.
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