ALMA has produced one of the most detailed views yet of Betelgeuse's lumpy surface

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ALMA has produced one of the most detailed views yet of Betelgeuse's lumpy surface

the gist

ALMA, the radio telescope array in Chile, has produced one of the most detailed images so far of the surface of Betelgeuse. The star is a red supergiant about 600 light-years away in Orion, and it is almost 800 times the size of the Sun. Unlike the smooth Sun, Betelgeuse has a highly uneven, bubbling surface with peaks and troughs. The image shows giant convection cells, large rising and sinking patches of hot gas, that churn across the star. Seeing that structure directly helps astronomers understand how such a huge star loses mass and behaves before its eventual death.

so what

Betelgeuse is one of the best-known stars in the sky, and its surface behaviour matters for understanding how red supergiants shed material. The image turns a bright point of light into a visible, changing object.

fun fact

If Betelgeuse were placed at the centre of our Solar System, its outer edge would reach beyond the orbit of Mars.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

more on this

background

A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.

In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

From Wikipedia: A Corner in Wheat (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

see

D. W. Griffith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

G. W. Bitzer (cinematographer) under employment of the Biog…, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

DS Pugh, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Image: The Public Domain Review

source: The Public Domain Review ↗

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