Tea at Trianon: A Hydrogen Galaxy

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

Friday, July 19, 2024

A Hydrogen Galaxy

From DigitiMed:

If verified, the object might provide scientists a glimpse into an early period of galaxy history. “I’ve been in this field for quite a few decades, and we’ve wanted to find something like this for a very long time,” says research leader Karen O’Neil, an astronomer at West Virginia’s Green Bank Observatory, to Astronomy. The first indication of something unexpected was a difference between observations obtained by the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Nançay Radio Telescope in France as part of a coordinated study of dim galaxies. Though they were meant to be staring at the same sky, the 100-meter-wide GBT detected something the Nançay Radio Telescope did not.

“Upon looking a little bit closer at it and spending far too much time, we discovered that we had actually mistyped the coordinates in the GBT catalog,” O’Neil stated Jan. 8 at a news conference at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) winter meeting in New Orleans. “This is something, unfortunately, astronomers do occasionally late at night.” (Read more.)