a life of retreating in God's love through family, friends, quilting, and museum

Thursday, 16 February 2012

Amazing Thursday

In between times of meetings and travelling, it is always wonderful to take time to pray. A mini retreat. A free mini retreat :) Short prayers to thank God for the day. Shorter prayers just before one goes into a meeting that one dosn't say something stupid. I actually like waiting for the City bus.... as I wait, I pray for family and friends and Church community. If the bus is late, then I start on praying for the people who live near the bus stop and the people driving by the bus stop. A mini retreat during the day.

Yesterday we heard the news that our Clerk of Session had died. In21 billion solar masses, is located in a very dense region of space called the Coma Cluster, where over 1,000 galaxies have been identified.

The largest supermassive holes also tend to be surrounded by bright companions, who have also grown large from the plentiful mass in their surroundings. (Of course, its not the black holes that are bright, but the quasars that surround them.) The long and the short of it is that supermassive black holes are usually found in galaxy clusters, and usually have other supermassive companions in the same region of space. They’re not found in isolation.

But this newly found black hole is in a rather sparse region of space. It’s in NGC 1600, an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus, 200 million light years from Earth.