Some cosmological mysteries

Excerpting the article at this link:

http://listverse.com/2014/05/30/10-unsolved-stellar-mysteries-in-our-galaxy/


The Nebula Of Uncertain Parentage
Planetary nebulae were discovered in the 1780s. The astronomer William Herschel believed that they were newly forming planetary systems. He was wrong, but the name stuck. They’re actually glowing clouds of gas around a dying star, and they’re often quite beautiful....
Many planetary nebulae are bipolar, meaning that they have symmetrical clouds coming from opposite sides of their star—they’re often compared to an hourglass or a butterfly. Sharpless 2-71 is made of multiple bipolar lobes in different orientations....

The Neutron Stars That Look Too Old
....The neutron star [left from a supernova explosion] in the center is spinning with a period of 6.7 hours per rotation. Since a star’s rotation speed slows down over time, this would normally put this particular neutron star’s age at several million years. However, the parent star went supernova around 2,000 years ago. The variation in the neutron star’s X-rays are also unusually large, so something is going on....

Multiple Messier Mysteries
...The stars of the Messier 15 globular cluster are unusually bunched in its center....

Crab [Nebula] Flares

"...Until 2011, it was thought to be one of the most steady sources of light, radio, and gamma radiationin the sky....
But between 2007 and 2010, astronomers from different observatories detected three powerful gamma ray flares with no change in other wavelengths. This was described by one astronomer as a “big puzzle,” while another called it a “real mystery.” The unexpected flares were the first seen from a nebula and were five times more intense than any other yet observed....."

Aligned Bipolar Nebulae

"...It’s not just the jumbled bipolar nebulae in Sharpless 2-71 that pose a mystery to astronomers. Scientists used the Hubble to examine 130 such objects in the central bulge of the Milky Way and found something weird. The nebulae were in different places, formed at different times, and have never interacted. Yet despite that, most of them appear to be aligned along the same axis...."

The Great Eruption
"....In 1838, the glow of Eta Carinae increased until it became the second brightest star in Earth’s sky. It stayed that way for 10 years...."

Mysterious Magnetars
"...Magnetars are a type of neutron star with a magnetic field quadrillions of times stronger than Earth’s. They’re the most powerful magnets in the universe. They were only theorized in the 1990s and they’re filled with properties that we still haven’t figured out...."

The Sun’s Mysterious Cousins
'...Around a third of Sun-like stars have year-long periods of varied brightness as they approach the ends of their lives. ... The conclusion [of a recent study] was clear, and told us exactly what we already knew: “All the possible explanations for their unusual behavior just fail....”'

Epsilon Aurigae’s Disc

Polaris Is Awkward
as described in an essay entitled "The North Star Mysteries: The Remarkable Brightness Increase of Polaris from Historical and Modern Observations."

Crows and kids

Our link is to an article on experiments with wild crows. My point here is beyond the conclusions the scientists and bloggers may have made.

The setup is that crows who have not been in a laboratory setting before could not figure out how to extract food from the plastic box with levers, setup in the laboratory. 

Here is how Ed Yong put the point----
quote
These two abilities—understanding causality, and using that understanding—seem so simple and mundane to us that it feels weird to lay them out, and weirder still to separate them. But they are separate. That much becomes clear when you study an animal that can do one of these things and not the other.end quote

What the study purports to conclude is that without the experience of successfully using their problem solving abilities, they cannot repeat and extend their problem solving. Read the article.

In fact, this study is much more interesting.  Not surprisingly little attention is paid to the moment crows or humans DO get the connection between cause and effect. That is because the study, as is typical of much natural science, begs the question of origins.Ignoring this question leads to the idea that crows in the wilderness never have a moment of insight about causality, and that babies come out of the womb with an abstract idea of this connection. Rather silly if you draw out these conclusions. 

And origins is exactly where this study took me. The question of whether essence precedes existence (what the study calls "understanding causality, and using that understanding") is the tawdry story of 20th century philosophy. But that is really an aside. 

What Yong calls the ability to 'understand causality' I am calling, rather vulgarly and more broadly, a moment of mystical insight, that is.essence --that which can directly perceive something, say the fact of causality. 

What the blogger calls applying the principle of causality, I am calling existence in the way that term was used in 20th century philosophy, that is a life of words. 

And the exciting possibility to which this study points is not only that the moment of insight comes before the typical cascade of words that unravel and develop that insight -- but that you can see this on a scale beyond that of the human.

And if you want to extend the crow story the implications of this study concern the wordless and the wordfull. One would not have thought this mystical goal extended to the creatures without verbal capacity. But maybe it does!!!!!!!!!!!!!