Thursday, December 06, 2007

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

So first my buddy Sean Williams sends me this, from an article on Dark Stars on Physorg.com:

"It is conceivable that gigantic dark stars may exist today, and although they do not emit visible light, they could be detected because they should spew gamma rays, neutrinos and antimatter and be associated with clouds of cold, molecular hydrogen gas that normally wouldn't harbor such energetic particles, he adds."

So, I'm fascinated and I go to said article to see more about these "dark stars" and I read:

"Perhaps the first stars in the newborn universe did not shine, but instead were invisible 'dark stars' 400 to 200,000 times wider than the sun and powered by the annihilation of mysterious dark matter, a University of Utah study concludes... Dark stars may explain why black holes – collapsed stars so dense that not even light escapes – formed much faster than expected. [Associate professor of physics at the University of Utah] Gondolo says black holes existed only a few hundred million years after the big bang, yet current theories say they took longer to form. 'These dark stars may help. They could collapse into black holes very early because they are very short-lived and formed when the universe was young, at least in one scenario.' Another possibility is that dark stars lasted quite a while but eventually turned into conventional stars. Gondolo and colleagues, however, argue the gas cooling and dark matter heating within a dark star can remain in balance, allowing dark stars to survive, but that depends on certain assumptions about the mass of neutralinos."

And so, of course, my first thought is that clearly dark stars were what filled the sky when the Old Ones were in power. And when the stars changed to conventional stars, that's when R'lyeh sank. Natch.

And trying to check the spelling on R'lyeh, I pop over to wikipedia and what should I find but (emphasis mine):

"...the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh ... was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults . . ." —H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

From the dark stars! There it is, all the way back in 1928! All hail the green, sticky spawn of the stars!

2 comments:

Lisa said...

"They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape...but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky..." -- Old Castro

Sounds like the Great Tentacled One had wormhole technology too. :snerk:

Have you seen LOLTHULHU?

Lou Anders said...

Hi Lisa:
I hadn't seen Lolthulhu - that's hysterical. Or some of it anyway.
Thanks!