Tea at Trianon: Oumuamua

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 17, 2020

Oumuamua

From Earth Sky:

An astronomer using a telescope in Hawaii spotted the first known interstellar object in 2017. That was after astronomers had estimated that several such objects – natural objects not born in our solar system or bound to our sun – should pass inside Earth’s orbit each year. The IAU designated it as 1I/’Oumuamua, the 1I for first interstellar and ‘Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for a messenger from afar arriving first. Astronomers on all parts of Earth had only a few months to study this object; when first spotted, it had already passed closest to our sun and was heading out of our solar system again. They found the object to be dry (not icy like a comet) and peculiarly elongated. How was it formed, and where did it come from? Now computer simulations appear to confirm what many had suggested: that ‘Oumuamua came to us after a close encounter with its parent star and that it might, indeed, be a fragment of a shattered alien world. (Read more.)