Inspired by this week’s weekend writing prompt: Tempest
27 words challenge:
It is there, known to those who have learnt to listen: only it is silent, or rather beyond our perception. The vortex, the shearing of the fabric.
tempests in space
This is part of a dream: tempests in space. There is no sound in empty (?) space, or in any space without a carrier, air, water, anything that can respond to pressure. I have always wondered if we could somehow hear the gigantic astronomical disturbances shown by our telescopes. Astronomers enhance these pictures with colours, which give us some out-of-this world pictures of gigantic chaos, stars burning, exploding, being swallowed by darkness, giants and dwarves, galaxies merging…
At sea tempests can be frightening. There is sheer beauty there, the enormous waves, the walls of water. Japanese artists have been wonderfully skilled at describing those tsunamis. This is all due to the wind, the movement of the tides, atmospheric pressure and many other factors, including seismic activity. I guess in space dislocations and collisions are the result of gravity and electromagnetic forces. I read once that stars communicate through filaments of particles and magnetic fields. A gravity storm? What would this sound like?
tempests in the far distance
No doubt as our probes go deeper and farther opportunities will arise for creative people to make use of the material, although things are limited by that absolute: the speed of light.
Think about this: in space we cannot hear any sound, by anything at all cannot come back to us other than at best, at the speed of light. So, about those tempests in the far distance are things long gone, through eons of time.
Picture: Andromeda fills the field of view. The Milky Way begins to show distortion due to tidal pull from Andromeda. Image released May 31, 2012.
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