"Benford-LifeAtGalactic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

generators, a cliche overworked in films like Frankenstein.

Could these fibers be a sort of slow-motion lightning, taking perhaps hundreds
of thousands of years to discharge? Then we might see filaments curling about
themselves, or each other?

I asked these questions, sketched out solutions, and made a few predictions. In
science any model, to win flavor, must paint an appealing picture and predict
the outcome of future observations. I published the model in the Astrophysical
Journal in 1988, "An Electrodynamic Model of the Galactic Center."

People seemed to find it plausible, if a bit strange. Electrodynamics isn't used
much in astronomy, where gravity rules. I waited to see what observations would
unmask.

Mark Morris kept making maps of the Arch region, but so far has seen no
brightening or dimming, In 1990, though, some other radio astronomers found an
odd thread they termed the Snake -- because it twisted, not once but twice,

I was pleased. The Snake seems attached to a giant molecular cloud at one end,
and merges with the spherical rim of a supernova at the other. Is its cause the
cloud, or the supernova? We don't know.

For now, mine seems the only theory left standing in the blizzard of data we're
now getting about the galactic center. But my model depends on, without
explaining, the strong smooth magnetic fields. How did they get there? Are they
simply accumulated, as matter in falls? Or did some past explosion make them? We
don't know.

And what about the jet? This points to the big unanswered question about the
center: is there a black hole there? Certainly our experience with distant,
active galactic nuclei leads us to suspect one, since the galactic jets I had
already studied almost certainly come from the accretion disks around truly
massive black holes, some ranging up to perhaps a billion stellar masses.

Measures of the orbital velocities of stars very close to the true galactic
center, called Sagittarius A, suggest that a point mass of about a million
stellar masses lurks there, giving off very little light.

Much controversy surrounds these observations, though, with some holding that
the data could mean only a thousand stellar masses iS needed. All that is packed
into a radio bright structure less than ten times as wide as the distance
between the Earth and our sun. The region is hard to fathom, though, because the
total luminosity within fifteen light years of this structure is about ten
million stellar luminosities. Picture ten million or more bright, young stars
orbiting a tiny dark spot, and you'll see the problem making out what's going
on.

While I was mulling over data and jotting equations, I kept on writing novels.
What came to be called the Galactic Series (by my publisher) pushed on with