The Rosette Nebula, the Rose of Venus, and a Love Song Called A Rose
A Rose
Field Notes from the Kingdom
A Rose in the Winter Sky
I want to tell you about a few things I noticed this week. None of them need explaining. I just didn’t want to see them alone.
“Can you not see the stars?” There’s a rose in the winter sky called the Rosette Nebula, a huge cloud of glowing gas about 5,000 light-years away, near Orion. It’s too faint to see well with your eyes alone, so you need a telescope or a long-exposure photo. In pictures, it opens up red like petals around a hollow center.
That hollow center is a nursery. A cluster of young, hot stars sits in the middle, and their light and wind have cleared out the space around them. Stars like those start in clouds of gas around minus 260 degrees Celsius, colder than anywhere on Earth, until gravity pulls the gas together and they ignite. “Then the time is a rose, and I rise from the cold.”
Venus has a rose too. If you plot where Venus sits relative to Earth over eight years, its path draws a five-petaled flower. That happens because Earth goes around the Sun eight times in almost exactly the time Venus goes around thirteen times. Most wild roses have five petals. “If the planets, they know, and the love is chosen.”
About 300 million light-years away, two galaxies are pulling on each other. Hubble photographed them in 2011, and the smaller one’s gravity has twisted the bigger one into the shape of a rose. Astronomers call the pair Arp 273. “We’re rare, and part, dancing in the dark.”
Down here, roses have been around a long time. Fossil roses dug up in the American West are about 35 million years old. The same plant family gave us apples, strawberries, cherries, peaches and almonds. In winter, after the petals fall, wild roses leave red hips on their branches, and birds eat them and carry the seeds somewhere new.
In the northern forests of North America, the wood frog lets itself freeze in winter. Ice forms inside its body, its heart stops, and it stays that way for weeks. When spring comes, it thaws, its heart starts beating again, and it hops off to find a mate. That frog really does rise from the cold.
Every year in the Great Smoky Mountains, one firefly species flashes in sync, with thousands of them blinking together in the dark. It’s courtship. The males flash and then wait to see if someone answers.
You carry something like that too. Your brain has around 86 billion neurons, all reaching toward each other across tiny gaps. Oxytocin, one of the molecules involved when you bond with someone, is a chain of just nine amino acids. “Peptides, endorphins, and axiom connections.” It’s something that small, and look what it does to us.
“I just wanna fall in love with her all over.” That’s all I’ve got this week: a rose in the sky, a frog waking up out of the ice, and little lights in the dark waiting for an answer.
“So the king takes his throne, when it’s love, is bestowed.”
From the kingdom,
KxngLeon
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