Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
This is a photo of a star called HDE226868. It's a blue supergiant, more than 20 times as big – and hundreds of thousands of times as bright – as the Sun. And it's relatively close by, in the same part of the galaxy as we are: a thin line of stars in between two of the great spiraling arms of the Milky Way. Still, it takes light 1600 years to reach us from there. It's about 16 quadrillion kilometers away. And you can't see it with your naked eye; you need at least a small telescope to glimpse it through the clouds of interstellar gas and dust that stand between us and it.
Neutron stars are small but incredibly heavy, the dense remnant of a bigger star after it dies in a supernova explosion. They give off X-rays like crazy. And early observations seemed to confirm Bolton's suspicions: he could see that HBE226868 was wobbling slightly, which meant that there must be a massive source of gravity nearby. If that source of gravity was a neutron star, he'd have discovered a binary system: two stars orbiting around each other. That would have been a pretty exciting find for the young astronomer, who was particularly interested in those systems.
But Cygnus X-1 was no neutron star. After a couple of months spent collecting data at the Dunlap Observatory, Bolton began to suspect the truth about what he'd actually found. HBE226868 was orbiting something massive, alright. But it was orbiting it at an incredible speed: more than 200 times the speed of sound. That meant Cygnus X-1 was much smaller and much denser than a neutron star. It meant Cygnus X-1 was a black hole.
It seems that once upon a time, there was a really, really, really, really, really BIG star. Like more than 40 times bigger than the Sun big. For most of its life, it did what all stars do: crush hydrogen atoms together, the immensity of its gravity causing nuclear reactions to fuse them into helium. In fact, it was so big that eventually it was fusing that helium into even more complex elements, stuff like carbon and neon and oxygen and silicon. That's where all that stuff comes from: every single atom of it in the entire universe forged within a star. By the end of their lives, the very biggest stars make an even more complex and heavier element: iron. And so, at the centre of this particular gigantic star, a great iron core was building up. In the end, it was so heavy that its atoms couldn't support its own weight anymore. It imploded. The enormous mass was crushed down into a tiny space. It became so dense, and its gravity so strong, that nothing that came close to it could ever escape again. Not even light. It became a black hole.
|An artist's conception of Cygnus X-1 and HBE226868|
Now, no one had ever found a black hole before. Einstein's theories of relatively – and the quantum physics that followed – had predicted them, but there were still plenty of scientists who didn't believe they existed at all. Bolton knew that going public with his discovery was going to be risky. It would either make or break his career. It wasn't until a pair of scientists in England – and then another one in the United States – seemed to confirm his findings that he published his paper. Even then, it was extremely controversial. People put forward plenty of arguments against it. It even became the subject of a famous bet between Stephen Hawking and another physicist, Kip Thorne. Hawking, who had long believed in black holes, says he was 80% sure that Bolton was right, but bet against it anyway. That way, even if he'd been wrong about black holes his entire career, he'd still win something.
But he wasn't wrong. In 1990, enough evidence had finally piled up to convince Hawking without a doubt. Bolton had been right. Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. The David Dunlap Observatory had discovered an extraordinary phenomenon never seen before. Hawking broke into Thorne's office at night and signed the bet. Thorne had officially won himself a one-year subscription to Penthouse magazine.
Tom Bolton still works as a professor at U of T, though they recently kicked him out of the David Dunlap Observatory so they could sell it to a developer, who has promised to preserve the facility itself. It's still open to the public, which more details on their webiste here.
As for the open land around it? That's currently being fought over at the Ontario Municipal Development Board. The developer wants to build on it, while community groups want to preserve the parkland, protect local wildlife (like this baby coyote, awwwww), and ensure that light pollution doesn't interfere with the view through the telescope. You can read about the fight here and support those who want to protect the land here.
In the late-'70s, Toronto prog-rockers Rush wrote a 28 minute-long, two part song about Cygnus X-1, which spanned two albums and tells the story of a spaceship captain who is pulled into the black hole only to find himself in the Greek mythological home of the gods, Olympus, where he settles a conflict between Apollo and Dionysus, and then becomes a god himself. You can listen to the whole crazy thing right here.
Also interesting: the Dunlap's telescope mirror was carved from the same glass the famed Palomar telescope in California, which inspired an Italo Calvino book and a Rheostatics song.
You can read a bit more about Tom Bolton in the U of T paper here.
And here's a sketch of the plans for the observatory, drawn in 1933, along with a couple of my favourite more recent photos of it:
Thursday, January 19, 2012
|Toll house, Dundas & Bloor|
Fifty years after that, some people, including our mayor, would propose building the Gardiner Expressway as a toll road, but that part of the plan never happened. So it wasn't until the 1990s that Bob Rae's provincial government would build the 407 to raise funds for the government (and then Mike Harris' government would essentially just sell it off to a private consortium to help balance his budget just before an election). It was the first toll road in the world without gates, operating electronically instead. And it was the first toll road in Toronto in more than century.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
|The Red Lion Inn|
It was on east side of Yonge Street, just north of Bloor. When it was built in 1808, our little town of York was still only 15 years old, far away to the south, just a few muddy blocks along the shore of the lake. The inn was built by one of Toronto's earliest settlers, Daniel Tiers, who seems to have come here as part of a group of mostly Germany immigrants. You hear a lot about those Germans when you read up on Toronto's early history too. They were promised free land in return for clearing Yonge Street out of the forest, from Eglinton all the way up to Lake Simcoe. They built the road, but never got their land, screwed over by the racist, rich British folk who ran our town back then.
When Tiers first built his inn, it would have been surrounded by an immense wilderness, an oasis in the middle of a forest thousands of years old. There were still wolves and bears in these parts back then, bald eagles and deer and foxes and flocks of passenger pigeons so thick they could block out the sun. But things changed fast. And even though it was well outside town, the intersection of Bloor and Yonge, with Davenport Road nearby, was already an important crossroads on the way down into the tiny new capital, where government business, the St. Lawrence Market, and a port to the rest of the world were waiting. Before long an entire village had sprung up around the Red Lion. They called it Yorkville. The settlement was founded by Joseph Bloor (who owned a brewery nearby and was extremely scary-looking) and our very first sheriff, William Botsford Jarvis (whose country estate, Rosedale, was just across the valley and who would play an important role in defeating William Lyon Mackenzie's famous rebellion).
Soon, the picturesque little village was functioning as an early suburb of Toronto, with people living there, but working downtown. And so, by the mid-1800s, our city had gotten its very first horse-drawn bus line. It was founded by a cabinet maker, who had the carriages made in his cabinet-making shop. Every ten minutes, another coach would leave the Red Lion Inn heading down Yonge Street into the capital. A couple of decades later, they were replaced by Canada's very first streetcar line.
The Inn was also, like most places where you could get drunk, an important meeting place. They say that in the lead up to that famous Rebellion of 1837, William Lyon Mackenzie's supporters would gather at the inn to plan their attack. And when Mackenzie had been undemocratically kicked out of parliament by the democracy-loathing Tory Party, it was at the Red Lion Inn that he was immediately re-elected — an important moment in the struggle to make Canada a true democracy.
Yorkville carried on as a quiet residential village of Victorian homes until the 1880s, when it was finally officially swallowed up by the city of Toronto. Nearly a hundred years later, in the late 1950s, those same homes would be converted into the smoke-filled coffee houses of our Beatnik scene — where poets like Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee and Gwendolyn Macewen got their starts. Before long, the Beats gave way to the hippies and those coffee houses were turned into rock 'n' roll and folk music clubs, home to the likes of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot. It wasn't until the late-'60s that the authorities decided to "eradicate" the scene, driving the hippies out to replace them with the high-end boutique shopping district that dominates Yorkville today — one of the most expensive retail strips in the world.
|This post is related to dream
10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern
William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
And it's not alone. The two blocks of Toronto Street, between Adelaide and King, were once two of the most gorgeous blocks in the entire city. But now, just about all of the old buildings you can see in the photo below have been demolished and replaced. One of the few survivors is the impressive columned building on the very left – which just so happens to have been Toronto's seventh General Post Office.