Of Stars and Monsters

Credit: NASA/ESA

OVERCOME:  The kids and I spent the morning plotting our victory in our "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy" Coursera class.  We're bumping up against the deadline for all of our homework and the final - the final is 40 percent of the grade, by the way.  

Yesterday, I wrote about our frustration with the homework for the class and how it is only remotely related to material actually covered in the class. Never have I had a class where the coursework was so far afield from what was advertised beforehand. But we're not quitters, so we've worked long and hard to try to deal with the situation.

Though we haven't clicked our final 'submit' buttons, I'm going to go out on a limb and declare us victorious. :) By my calculations today, we have passed the class if not with flying colors, but by a healthy margin. And that is no small victory. Go us. :)

Oh, and more importantly than the un-related homework, we actually learned lots of REALLY cool things by taking the class, so it was totally worthwhile. 

For instance, atop this post, you'll find Abell 2218, a galaxy cluster 2.1 billion light years away. Per Wikipedia, "Acting as a powerful lens, it magnifies and distorts all galaxies lying behind the cluster core into long arcs." See those stretched out star 'lines.'? They're lensed galaxies stretched along the cluster's center. Pretty cool!

And today we learned about the amazing Vera Rubin. An American astronomer, by studying galactic rotation curves, she uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion,which became known as the galaxy rotation problem. And in the 1970s, she obtained the strongest evidence up to date for the existence of dark matter.

                     

I think I might have to have the kids write Rubin a letter. It appears she's still active in the department of Terrestrial Magnetism at Carnegie Institution of Washington.

SETTLERS:  About once a week we drive down to the area between Renton and Kent to go to Winco for cheap groceries. Every time we go, we pass a tiny cemetery wedged between a highway, a mini storage and the Winco parking lot. I've never seen anyone visiting it.

A couple of days before we left for our NY/England trip, imagine my surprise when I saw a write up about it in the Seattle Times. The story told of a temporary art installation there, on the site of the Saar Pioneer Cemetery. Per the Times' story, apparently nearly half of the graves in the cemetery are unmarked. To honor them, local artists Frances Nelson and Bradly Gunn installed their large, walk through work, "Thresholds." 

I was happy to see it would still be up when we got back, and we did just that a couple days post-England. 

One of the first things we noticed at the cemetery was this marker, a permanent catch-all for so many unmarked graves.

We also saw the art installation - stark, white and large, commanding attention in the small space.

But even more arresting were the grave markers that were on site.  Some of the people buried there were very early settlers of the area, indeed, dating back to the early 1800s.

Perhaps the most memorable headstone in the place was that of the Monster family, John and his baby (no mention of whether it was a boy or a girl). Poor John didn't live past 40, and his baby lived only 3.5 months. Baby Monster was joined by John less than a year later. 

There were a single handful of folks buried in the cemetery who live to the ripe old age of 70 or beyond, but for most, life was a whole lot shorter.