We’re so very clueless.

The image above, published by NASA on 5 February 2013, shows cosmic clouds and stellar winds interacting with the flow of the Orion Nebula and specifically with a young variable star in the nebula called LL Orionis.  Still in its formative phase and adrift in Orion’s stellar nursery, LL Orionis produces a much more energetic wind than does our middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slower moving gas, a shock front forms, rather like the bow wave of a boat moving through water or of a plane traveling at supersonic speed. The small arcing structure just above and left of center is LL Orionis’s cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across. The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula’s hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, which is located off the upper left corner of the picture. Seen in three dimensions, LL Orionis’s wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along its “bottom” edge. The picture is a detail from a larger mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, which is filled with a myriad of fluid shapes that scientists understand to be associated with star formation.

I just finished reading Richard Panek’s excellent The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality.  I can’t say that I understood or even remember everything that I read in the book; there’s a great amount of cutting-edge science in it, as well as many scientific players and organizations.  Frankly, it could have used the kind of glossary of persons that sometimes appears at the end of a long Russian novel.

But it tells a fascinating story, full of human interest and intrigue and vivid personalities as well as the most inconceivably vast sweeps of time and space.

It concludes (on page 242) with a summary of things as they stood in 2010:

The universe is 13.75 billion years old.

It’s composed of 72.8% dark energy and 22.7% dark matter.  The remainder — 4.56% of the universe — is “baryonic matter.”  That’s the matter that we know, the matter that we can often see and sometimes touch, the stuff of which stars and planets and mountains and pine trees and Porsches and buildings and kittens and babies are made.  These figures, writes Panek, offer “an exquisitely precise accounting of the depth of our ignorance.”

They are, or ought to be, humbling.

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia