Tea at Trianon: Birth of a Planet

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

Thursday, August 3, 2023

Birth of a Planet

From Live Science:

A strangely-flickering star has led two of the world's most powerful telescopes to a rare and wonderful sight: A young star system, pregnant with enormous clumps of gas, on the verge of birthing a giant, Jupiter-size planet.

Scientists discovered the stellar baby bumps around a star called V960 Mon, located roughly 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Monoceros (Greek for "the unicorn"). This star first caught astronomers' attention in 2014, when it suddenly brightened to more than 20 times its original luminosity and then faded over several months. Several studies suggested the presence of an invisible companion star playing gravitational tricks on V960 Mon, forcing globs of gas and dust onto the star and causing it to brighten and grow.

Now, new observations from Chile of the star system taken with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) show that V960 Mon has not only a meddling companion star in its orbit but also a twisted system of galaxy-like spiral arms lashing out into space — which appear to be funneling gas and dust into enormous, planet-size clumps. (Read more.)