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

I began studying the galactic center in the mid-1970s, out of curiosity. I did
not guess that this mysterious region would intertwine two of my passions,
physics and science fiction, though in part I was interested because I had begun
writing a series of novels which seemed pointed in that direction.

The first was In the Ocean of Night, exploring the discovery that computer-based
life seemed dominant throughout the galaxy. The action followed a British
astronaut, Nigel Walmsley, cranky and opinionated. It detailed a few incidents
in our solar system, in the late twentieth century and beyond, which uncovered
the implication that "evolved adding machines," as Walmsley put it, had
inherited the rains of earlier, naturally derived alien societies.

As I began work on the next volume, I realized that the galactic center was the
obvious place for machines to seek. By the early 1980s we knew that there is a
virulent gamma ray flux there, hot clouds, and enormously energetic processes.
Most of this we gathered from the radio emissions, which penetrate dust clouds
and revealed the crackling activity at the center for the first time. Infrared
astronomy soon caught up, unmasking the hot, tangled regions.

By the time I finished Across the Sea of Suns, I realized that I could do some
research myself on the galactic center. I had by that time written papers on
pulsars and galactic jets, and had both expertise and curiosity. Our galaxy is a
barred spiral, meaning that a straight segment runs through the center,
connecting two bright spiral arms. The inner thousand light years is a turbulent
zone of high velocity clouds, moving so fast that gravitation finds it difficult
to force them to collapse into stars. Magnetic fields are also strong, making
collapse still harder. Few new stars, so few later supernova explosions.

In the 1960s my friend Larry Niven had begun his Known Space stories, featuring
a colossal explosion at galactic center, perhaps a chain reaction of supernovas.
There was some evidence of greatly energetic processes there, but we know now
that there was no such mammoth explosion, big enough to make alien races flee.
However, within the inner hundred light years, there does seem to have been a
great energy release a few million years ago. In the infrared we can see the
outrushing gases.

More striking, though, are mysterious features appearing in the radio. In 1984 I
was giving a talk on galactic jets at UC Los Angeles, and my host was Mark
Morris, a radio astronomer. "Explain this," he challenged, slapping down a radio
map he had just made at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

"Good grief," was my first reaction. "Is this a joke?"

It showed a feature I called the Claw, but which Mark more learnedly termed the
Arch: a bright, curved prominence made up of slender fibers. Though the Arch is
over a hundred light years long these fibers are about a light year wide.

They curve upward from the galactic plane, like arcs of great circles which
center near the galactic core, which is several hundred light years away. These