Milky Way and the galaxy give us food for thought
KATE Winslet looks terrific in the new Woody Allen film Wonder Wheel. Already she has been touted as an Oscar winner for her performance as the faithless wife of a Coney Island amusement park operator in the 1950s. Kate is one of our finest period actresses and she should get a New Year gong… as they say on Twitter, #justsayin. ASTRONOMERS have discovered the most extraordinary fact about our galaxy: the Milky Way is hungry. It hunts down smaller galaxies and eats them, consumes them whole. Then it prowls on through the universe for fresh meat. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
We live in an unprecedented age. All at once, it seems, mankind has solved – and is solving – riddles and mysteries that baffled it for thousands of years. In just two or three generations answers to timeless questions (including questions we didn’t even know existed) have begun to flow thick and fast. The dam of ignorance has almost overnight been terminally breached.
We know children look like their parents because of something called DNA. We know how to fly, faster than the speed of sound if we choose. We know exactly how far the moon is from us and that it is made, not of cheese, but a chunk of protoEarth. We know the difference between bacterium and viruses and mostly how to defeat, manipulate or contain them.
We use satellites to communicate instantly around the world. Soon we’ll fly to Mars and probably colonise it. Intelligent robots are with us already and inside a decade will have utterly changed the way humans live. And so on. But Mankind is no further forward on the biggest question of all: why we are here. For all our sudden avalanche of achievements and discoveries, no one has come close to touching the face of God.
Which brings me back to the hungry Milky Way. Scientists have photographed two galaxies – ours and another similarly large one nearby – teaming up to “bully” and consume a much smaller one. Big galaxies like our own need to continually “eat” smaller galaxies to get food for making new stars. Otherwise they run out of fuel, cool down and die. “The Milky Way has to eat galaxies to keep building stars. It needs food – and these minor galaxies are kind of snacks,” Australian National University astronomer Naomi McClure-Griffiths says.
The current “snack” is one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye: the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits ours. Without a telescope it appears as a small fuzzy blob in the night sky. But one day it will be gone: the Milky Way and its giant neighbour are steadily and vampirically sucking away its hydrogen, the basic building block of all star systems.
The evidence for this has been captured by radio telescopes. It’s like watching two wolves pairing up to stalk a deer.
So just like living, sentient life forms here on Earth, our galaxy needs to feed. Philosophers have long asked the fundamental question: is the cosmos conscious? Does the Milky Way have an intrinsic, intangible sense of self? An awareness of being? Until now I would have laughed at the suggestion.
But a galaxy that needs to eat – and ruthlessly hunts down prey to do so – poses some profound questions. The Old Testament teaches that ours is a jealous God. If we ever do look upon His face, perhaps we’ll see that it’s a hungry one too. A bit scary, no?