Where the Vanished Light Goes

Okay, let's get this bit over with first.

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The following bit of rambling writing grew out of a poem that grew out of a CNN tweet of an article about the biggest ever black hole that has been discovered so far:

"Astronomers have found the fastest-growing black hole ever seen in the universe. "

I am not a science person, but there are two topics that I have always been interested in- the first being evolution and the second being space. One reason for that would be my parents. My first non-fiction read were a series of picture books for kids on the stars and cosmos, and on the creation of the world and evolution of life that my parents bought for me from the Kolkata Book Fair. The second reason, on the space front- would be the Bengali magazine Anandamela. I remember the one time in junior high school when I volunteered a topic for my house' turn to do the wall magazine- it was on NASA because Anandamela had just done a cover-story on it.

I also remember one afternoon after school playing at being a a planet-hopping astronaut (while waiting for my mother to come and pick me up) with a bewildered classmate who couldn't keep up with my enthusiasm, and I remember how invested I was in another's classmate's fourth standard ambition to become an astronaut when we grew up- I was slightly disappointed when I discovered years later that she didn't in fact become one via Facebook, but people grow and dreams change and here we are.

No, I did not want to become an astronaut myself.

 Even back then I wasn't interested in the technicalities but in the stories, or shall we say, the poetry of it. I wondered about life on other planets, and what they looked like and if we would ever meet them. I wondered about the possibility of space travel, wondered about the skies and landscapes in other planets, though my father said people couldn't travel at the speed of light. I was intrigued by the theory that the three main pyramids of Giza could have been built by aliens because their locations reflected the positions of the stars of the Orion constellation. I wanted to know what a black hole looked like and what was on the other side of it. When I read H.G.Well's The Time-Machine, what  stirred me most was not the idea of the inexorable nature of fate and time that rendered all human desires futile but the image of a dark, dying world beneath a sky from where the sun was gone forever. The possibility of that future, of this beautiful planet becoming a dead world, no matter how many centuries later was depressing. We accept our individual mortality, more or less. But to give up on our legacies, to think of a time when all of this will mean nothing because even the concept of meaning will be gone, and all our stories will be gone, and all our values and ideas- that's sort of hard to wrap our head around.

And so, in the article that I mentioned, there was a line that caught my attention-

"It's growing so quickly it can devour a mass the size of the sun every two days." So I wondered, what if any of those stars already devoured had planetary systems,and what if those planets had people?

(Artistic impression of an imaginary black hole passing by Earth and its gravity, destroying our planet. The Earth would stand no chance if it encountered a rogue black hole; the black hole’s tidal forces would easily rip the planet apart.Copyright: ESO.Org)

If a sun was devoured by a black hole, it's planets would be pulled in too, right? And I don't know the science of this, but when exactly would they die? When the sun died? Or before that, when the pull first began? Would they die of cold or lack of air or earthquakes and tsunamis? And would they know they were dying?

I don't claim to be scientifically accurate, but this is what I thought. What happens if you're alive in a sunless world, and time has broken down because there is nothing to measure time against? It's like trying to imagine what was before the Big Bang- before the existence of time and space and we can't even envision the possibility. St.Augustine in the fourth century declared that time was God's creation, and there was simply no 'before'. And yet, the white hole theory suggests that the matter and energy sucked in by a black hole passes through a singularity to originate as a new parallel universe. And we are all made of stardust, children of supernovas scattered through cosmic millenia.

As another Twitter user commented on the thread- They don't know everything yet about black holes. Black holes may seem to be the end of everything, but who knows what happens inside them? And matter can't simply case to exist, right?

To misquote our favoure JKR:

Where do vanished stars go?

Into non-being, that is everywhere.

Thanks for reading, and here's the poem I wrote for Week 16 of the Airplane Poetry Movement, 2018.

The prompt was: What would you choose to see if you were given a pair of reality-distorting glasses? 

Please comment and share if you enjoyed reading. What do you think happens inside a black hole? Do you believe in life outside earth? Or the worm-hole thoery?