The Instant-Observer

The Instant-Observer is an observer at a specific instant of time. From the parts of an atom to the universal landscape, can an instant-observer be anything but human? While there are various states of awareness, receptivity and sensitivity within and between groups of individual entities, the act of observing is commonly associated with humans, more likely defined as a basic empirical procedure. 

Yet in everyday life, the word ‘observe’ is used more casually.  He observes her; she observes him. An osprey observes the movement in the water until it plunges to catch a fish. A diamondback terrapin, even without sensing the danger it poses, will observe the traffic before crossing Route 1. Observation is the basic step; it ain’t require a problem-solving mechanism. Yet, in science, observation requires getting it right, the factual if not actual element.

Let’s put up front a hypothesis: an Instant-Observer is a random individual entity at a random time of history in a random place within an infinite number of superposed states emerging in a seemingly random manner, may that be a multiverse. The assessment of what they observe is inherently limited to themselves and to the moment in time. 

All appear to randomly fluctuate into existence in the Quantum realm. At the interface, the present Universe gathers one set of factual outcomes. Physical movements inducing a change in positions map out kinematically the factual Universe. Instant by instant, entities such as filaments, galaxies, globular clusters, and star systems build their historicity, each named accordingly as parts of a process of becoming. Yet, an instant-observer is untouched by what is chosen.

From galaxies once described as island universes to the theoretical framework of a multiverse, motion is a mode of expression. Within a multiverse-wide communication system, universes are islands in a multidimensional sea, not coming together nor breaking apart. Made of strings of observers, they are incidental, hiding in plain sight as if time itself could be pulled apart from space.

The Instant-Observer is human…

A human observer affirms their intention to self-locate from the standpoint of all the moments that they proceed to observe the cosmic sky, each relying on others, counting on them to show a better path forward. None of this, by a single moment, nor by a single observer… Each sees through a narrow window, tracing one segment at a time of a winding path without knowing where it is all going. They cannot say…

The instant-observer has new knowledge today that the same observer, or another, did not have at an earlier instant of time. In 1784, Delta Cephei was the first variable star to be observed by John Goodricke who noticed its period of five days, eight hours and 37 and half minutes. More than a century later, Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered a remarkable relation, among photographs taken of the Small Magellanic Cloud, between the brightness of variable stars and the length of their pulsation periods as determined by their mass, density and surface brightness.

To a human observer, stars do not just illuminate the night sky. They light the way to understanding the extent to which cosmic distances stretch and the place humans occupy within the universal grid. Leavitt’s observations stood the test of time and became the stepping stone towards grasping the general orders of distances. Looking back in time, an instant-observer thought they made a discovery — a star, a galaxy, a globular cluster,… Moving forward, ideas and theories take on a life of their own.

The intent to self-locate led to the discovery that the Milky Way is an isolated entity distinct from its closest and most imposing neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. From then on, stellar systems were mapped, using globular clusters as landmarks. Today, the ultra-faint Candidate Dark Galaxy-2 is the first galaxy to be observed purely through its four globular clusters in the Perseus cluster. It may be the most globular cluster dominated galaxy and potentially one of the most dark matter dominated galaxies ever detected. If not for the red-shifts that increase with distance, a human observer would loose all connectedness to most distant astronomical objects, such as little red dots commonly believed to be quenched, old stellar systems, that may otherwise be globular clusters, as in the case of those in and around the Sparkler. 

The Instant-Observer is a star…

Individual entities are transient and variable. They faint and become elusive across time and space. Cosmic light, from the perspective of a human observer, is property of a distant astronomical object or system. It, too, is variable, sometimes cyclical, sending its bright signal across infinite distances. Yet humility teaches the worm’s eye view, that the stars’ inner workings are unrelated to whether their motion — mode of expression — catches the eye of a human observer.  

In a very large Universe, may that be a multiverse, that does not revolve around humans, let’s put forward the hypothesis that even a star — or a globular cluster — by displaying the freedom to exist is an Instant-Observer in their own time and space. Candle-like stars shine light on their own inner being, evolutionary stage and spatiotemporal position within the Universe. At some instant in time, they, too, dim and disappear.

The Instant-Observer is a globular cluster… 

In the night sky, what the naked eye might take from afar for one single star may be the combining luminosities of many. Globular clusters are close aggregations of stars containing thousands to millions of them packed within regions as wide as tens of light years across, sometimes large and compact in the center, other times smaller and less dense to the point of being so faint for having survived unusually strong dynamical processes. 

Within their boundaries, stars’ distribution resembles the distribution of density in a gravitation sphere of a particular kind of gas. Indeed, they may have originated as gravitationally bound gas clouds before galaxies formed. From protoglobular gas clouds to globular star clusters, some appear homogeneous, others have multiple stellar populations, mixing, migrating, and interbreeding, in a way reminiscing cross-populations in human history. 

High stellar densities naturally cause stars to interact and collide, favoring in situ self-enrichment and chemically complex star systems, such as exotic objects and binaries. The S1082, notably, in the open cluster M67, is likely a quadruple system comprising a close eclipsing binary and a wider binary, with both subsystems hosting blue stragglers. Arisen from a complex set of mechanisms, blue stragglers are core-hydrogen-burning stars, anomalously massive. They were first observed in the crowded environment of about 44,500 stars within 8 inches from the center of the globular cluster M3.

While a few globular clusters may be relatively young, most are over 10-12 billion years old, with some almost as old as the Universe. Processes from the first few million years overlap each other in their historical occurrence and chemical composition. Metal-rich globular clusters are more likely to be found in galactic bulge and thick disk than in the halo, compared to metal-poor ones.

The Instant-Observer is a galaxy… 

From their growth to the formation of bulge and disc, from the birth of stars to their death, galaxies play a role in the production, enrichment, and dispersion of metals. Like a 4D imaging, their bodies keep traces of inflows from progenitors and fossil signatures of past encounters that they once were subject to. The Milky Way has about 200 globular clusters, formed by its in situ processes, including Aurora in the Solar Neighborhood,  as well as by material added during merger events. 

In its distant past, the Milky Way was the scene of a sequence of associated events linked to one or more mergers whose theoretical existence is described at length. The most ancient merger, Kraken, may have preceded another one, Heracles, before the galactic bulge was even formed. Its local/inner halo may be comprised of debris from at least three massive accretion events (Heracles, Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage, and Sagittarius) and two/three lower mass debris (Thamnos, Helmi stream, Sequoia) with some events about one to two billion years apart. A major accretion event with a massive dwarf galaxy gave rise to the elongated substructure, the Gaia Sausage, depositing two thirds of the Milky Way’s stellar halo while the Sequoia event provided the bulk of the high energy retrograde stars in the stellar halo, discernible in the retrograde stellar substructures of the Milky Way. 

Even black holes are accreted during merger events or born out internally, such as in the case of the first black hole to be observed in a globular star cluster of galaxy NGC 4472. Within Omega Centauri — the Milky Way’s most massive globular cluster and a system closely trailed by the Fimbulthul stream — an intermediate-mass black hole may be the remnant of a progenitor called Nephele. 

Was there a period of mutual observation before merging entities went at each other? Were dwarf galaxies filled with a haunting sense of nobodyness while larger ones were animated with a predatory instinct in a similar way to what has been observed among living beings on planet Earth? What binds humans is the stories we tell.

It was Time’s morning when there nothing was, 

Not even Earth, not even heaven

If not for a great Abyss, 

The yawning gap named the Ginungagap*

Before the primeval chaos began 

Before the Earth was formed. 

There was a cosmic tree named Yggdrasil, 

One root was Niflheim, the misty darkness. 

Underneath, there was the source called Hvergelmer,

Out of which earthly matter first appeared. 

The Fimbulthul Stream is one of the streams 

Flowing from Hvergelmer.

The Instant-Observer is the Universe… 

Even before it was named as such by humans, there was a tiny bit of feeling in the act of observing. As it proceeded to collect a wealth of facts and a depth of vision, it strengthened its ability to feel and observe. 

Each instant-observer, whether they be a living being, a star, a globular cluster or a galaxy, explores what they are inherently and what, fundamentally, their relation is to the Universe not from the vantage point of their ever-shifting, ephemeral body nor from the limited viewpoint of instantaneous worlds that they factually belong to but from the sum of all corporeal selves and instantaneous worlds that provides the context to the place they occupy within the multiverse. None of this, by a single moment. None of this, by a single entity… On their journey, each picks up where it was once left off…

The realm of existence is anchored bit by bit in loops and islands of consciousness through the increasing duration of time. Conscious observers evolve and transition instant-by-instant. Some observations, however, may carry more weight than others. Yet, reality is measured, in a paradoxical way, by the very absence of what is not there, what comes before and after a specific instant of time — disappearing intervals that give credence to the continuous rhizomatic realm of nothingness.

*The Younger Edda: Also Called Snorre's Edda, Or the Prose Edda.... (1879). United Kingdom: S.C. Griggs.