The toss-up for this morning’s post was between what Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama has written about religion in The New York Times, and a video of a two-year-old Indonesian boy addicted to smoking. So I have chosen to write about a planet, some 600 light years away from us, being torn asunder by its sun. Somehow this fantastic cosmic violence overrides all our arbitrary notions of moral-immoral, right-wrong, good-evil, religion-irreligion.
NASA’s Hubble telescope has captured this planet called Wasp-12b being in the midst of getting slowly torn apart. The planet’s name is derived from Wide-Area Search for Planets, a British team which spotted the planet in 2008. The planet has got so close to its sun that it completes its orbit in 1.1 days, as opposed to 365 days that Earth takes. So severe is the sun’s pull on this planet that it is getting elongated at its equator. Its temperature has reached 1,500 degrees C. or 2,800 degrees F. The rate at which it is getting eaten up the planet will be destroyed in 10 million years.
The information we are getting today is actually 600 light years old or in other words the time it took for that information to travel 6000 trillion kilometers from Wasp-12b to the Hubble. What we are seeing today is the information that left Wasp-12b roughly when “Saint” Joan of Arc was hearing voices in eastern France or, to make it more relevant, just about the time the first Dalai Lama, Gedun Drupa was born in central Tibet.
When you consider such magnitudes you must wonder whether our self-absorbed anthropocentrism is of any relevance or consequence at all. And this is just one little planet around one little star at a relatively modest distance of 6000 trillion kilometers.