Installing Gravity Shifts

Thank you to Rachel Bruya, Trent Miller, Rebecca Pettyjohn, Seth McClure, Bubbler volunteers Brian and Sarah and everyone else who helped to get this up on the walls!

studio a flutter

Much of the work for the upcoming show is moving through the studio now.  There will be few posts to follow as this will eat most of my remaining energies.

I have been posting pics of more work in progress on my twitter feed (@jlwineberg) using #studioshot and #gravityshifts.

Hoping that you will be able to see the working installed this July and August!

the more illustrious black hole

I would just like to document a few of the illustrations of black holes that I find compelling.

The one is an artist conception from NASA/JPL-Caltech showing a supermassive black hole at the center, surrounded by matter flowing onto the black hole in an accretion disk. This disk forms as the dust and gas in the galaxy falls onto the hole, attracted by its gravity:

It was used in a report on a recently discovered super massive black hole that is so super massive that it pokes a hole into the current theory on the growth of black holes, even.

Another artist conception focuses on a binary system where one star has collapsed into a black hole and eats its companion (a phenomena earlier referenced in this blog).   It is from the wikipedia entry on the accretion disc:

An actual image of the phenomena captured with the Hubble Telescope by L. Ferrarese of Johns Hopkins University and NASA is also listed in the same entry:

Other NASA concept drawings are available on the wikipedia commons.  This one focuses on the center of the accretion disc where the event horizon shows itself as the light sucking center of the formation leading to the singularity where all current theories are broken down into hints, whispers, conjectures and shrugs:

The last diagram, from a Inspirehep.net a high energy physics publication of a short article by Volker Beckmann (Francois Arago Centre / APC Paris) and Chris R. Shrader (NASA/GSFC), shows that Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) will look differently as differing angles of site.  Particularly interesting to me is the inclusion of one of the most compelling abstract shapes of all, the torus, here in cross-section representing the dusty absorber around the accretion disc:

0 G Space Art

On 4 April 1998, artist Frank Pietronigro flew aboard a NASA KC135 turbojet, often called the Vomit Comet, over the Gulf of Mexico from Houston’s Johnson Space Center and "experienced the awe-inspiring sensation of creating art in a microgravity environment as scientific research."

His his Research Project Number 34 was inspired by the Abstract Expressionist's famed experiments with gravity's effect on paint.  Carried out in free fall inside a kind of plastic tent, Pietronigro's "drift paintings" caught the serendipitous and spontaneous flow of the paint released from pastry tubes in the microgravity environment without the structural support of a traditional horizontally oriented canvas.  

Ah . . ., so much for the days when NASA had a budget for Abstract Expressionism in space.

Pietronigro continued to pursue art in microgravity by co-founding the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium in 2003, an international space art organization committed to increasing artists’ access to microgravity environments including parabolic flights and the International Space Station.

Melting Ice means Gravity Shift for Antartica

Somehow I missed this Slate article published last fall that reported on the European Space Agency's conclusion that loss of ice between 2009 and 2012 caused a dip in the gravity field over the West Antartica:

Though we all learned in high-school physics that gravity is a constant, it actually varies slightly depending on where you are on the Earth’s surface and the density of the rock (or, in this case, ice) beneath your feet. During a four-year mission, the ESA satellite mapped these changes in unprecedented detail and was able to detect a significant decrease in the region of Antarctica where land ice is melting fastest.

The change may not be not felt by the average penguin, but the changing water level, coast lines and weather patterns brought about by the melting ice is being felt by us all.

Alison's Shifting Center of Gravity

My wife told me recently that one of the most remarkable experiences of gravity she had was during her pregnancies, the shift in her center of gravity, the extra weight causing her to renegotiate her body's sense of balance, effecting her sleeping patterns, daily commute, the picking up fallen objects, etc.  I have fond memories of watching her work out her new and constantly changing balance.  I found this photo of her being swung in a hammock by my daughter, two days before she delivered our 10 pound son, two weeks after his due date:

A new center . . .

Gravity

The world had a new center
And that center was you
As I walked the night away
Peering down into the glittering night sky
I felt I was floating
And all that kept me tethered
From falling into that great abyss
Was the gravity of my love for you. 

-emily sha