Tea at Trianon: Black Hole Jet With 'Peculiar' Radio Signal

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

Monday, September 11, 2023

Black Hole Jet With 'Peculiar' Radio Signal

From Space:

Astronomers have spotted mysterious changes in a jet of highly magnetic plasma blasted out by a small black hole that is gorging on gas and dust. The feature takes the form of periodic changes in the jet occurring within a fraction of a second that have been detected by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China. Astronomers know that the strange blinking object, called GRS 1915+105, consists of a regular star orbiting a stellar black hole, a black hole that was born after a massive star had died. As the star orbits the black hole, some of its material gets sucked into the cosmic monster, which fails to swallow all of the material and instead accelerates some of it into the jet that appears to squirt from its poles. (Read more.)