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Boy, this has been an intense week for astronomy news. First there was the largest neutron star ever discovered (it would take an eighth grader nearly an hour to bicycle a distance equivalent to its diameter!), then there was the story about Tabby’s Star gulping down exoplanets and pulverizing a moon (Ferrebeekeeper didn’t post that one, but you can read about it here) and now, today brings reports of another extra-solar mystery object akin to the mysterious Oumuamua which caused such a sensation back in 2017.
C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) in the middle of the image: Note the faint tail!
Back in August 30, 2019, Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer from Ukraine, spotted an unknown comet which has been dubbed “C/2019 Q4 (Borisov)”. Not only is the comet traveling at the blazing speed of 150,000 kilometers per hour (93,000 mph), it also has a hyperbolic orbit (meaning the object is not bound to the solar system) and it is approaching from a strange angle which in skew to the planar disk of the solar system.
At present the comet is far away from Earth and yet approaching on a path which puts the sun between us and the object (astronomers don’t like pointing their telescopes into the sun for some reason), however the mysterious object should approach as close as Mars at which point we will be able to learn more about it. Right now all we know is that C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) has a diameter between 2.4 and 15 kilometers (1.5 to 10 miles) and doesn’t seem to be from around here. Whereas Oumuamua zipped through before we could get a good handle on it, we should have a chance to properly study this comet. Since comets (unlike strange asteroid shards) are volatile, we should be able to get a sense of its composition by studying the makeup of the tail. Stay tuned for more news about this peculiar object!
The River Styx (from achristouillustration.com)
We have previously addressed the chimerical nature of magenta—a color which does not actually exist, but strongly seems to because of the way that humans perceive light. In the intervening years, you have probably been wondering if there are other colors like this: hues which are not there except for tricks of the brain. Today we bring you an amazing & impossible color from the underworld. “Stygian blue” is a supersaturated blue/violet which is also as dark as the darkest black! It would be the coolest color in the rainbow except for the fact that it isn’t real…but you can still see it. In fact, if you keep reading, I’ll show it to you right here!
Before you call in the men with big white nets (who, like the bill collectors, are always creeping nearer anyway) allow me to explain. Stygian blue appears to exist because of the opponent color theory (explained below in an utterly unhelpful and incomprehensible diagram) a theory of color pioneered by the dramatist, poet, and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe!
“Oh! THOSE opponent colors…yes, of course!”
Opponent color theory deals with how the eye (and the mind) process information received from the three types of color-receptive cones commonly found in the human retina. Setting the biological details to the side, the theory essentially posits that certain colors reciprocally evoke fundamental opposite colors: blue and orange are opposites; red and green are opposites; yellow and purple are opposites; and so forth. This blog has come near to this territory before (with a pumpkin-colored Chevy Chase?) and we will return to component colors again, since they lie at a nexus between physics, aesthetics, neural science, and the unknown. But right now we only need to recognize that the opposite of dark blue is pale orange (at least to the human eye).
Flags (Jasper Johns, ca. 1967-1968,color lithograph)
In order to see stygian blue we must utilize a trick of physiology. If you stare long enough at a strong hue: you will see an afterimage of its component opposite—the negative reflection of the image you have looked at. A famous example is hack artist Jasper John’s bizarro American flag in orange, black, and green. If you stare at it for a few minutes, and then look at a white wall, you will see old glory proudly waving in your eyes…but there is no actual flag.
Likewise if you stare long enough at an orange/yellow blob, and then look at a black field, you will perceive a glistening phantasmagoric shade of ultra-blue which is as dark as the black, but is not black—stygian blue! Here is the swath I stole from Wikipedia which allows to do this while staring at your own monitor in the comfort of whatever cubical farm/battlefield/hyper-space sarcophagus where you are reading this.
Please note you have to stare with unflagging diligence at “x” for quite a while!
As a bonus the image includes some two other chimerical colors, hyperbolic orange and self-luminous red (which I did not think were sufficiently interesting to lead this essay, but which “exist” based on the same basic principles). Of course this does not actually involve any ghosts, supernatural entities, or Lovecraft colors which drive you insane (more so than usual anyway). Stygian blue is merely a trick of the brain…but so are a lot of things we spend our lives striving for and working on. I for one find the color quite pretty and I would wear it or use it in my paintings if such a thing were at all possible.
For example it would be a great color for a screaming Gorgon chariot!
ferrebeekeeper 