Espirais (Via Láctea - Spiral Jetty)

"The atoms of our biosphere have necessarily been created in the crucible stars and are sent forth into space when the stars die. These intertwined generations of stars and atoms begin to take place hundred million years after the Big Bang and will go on for several billion years thereafter. Space becomes a kind of forest of stars: stars big and small, young and old, die, disintegrate, and enrich the terrain to nourish new growth.



In our galaxy alone, an average of three stars come into being every year. Thus it is that, relatively late in the game, roughly four and a half billion years ago, on star of particular interest to us, our Sun, is born on the fringe of a spiral galaxy, the Milky Way.

Why "spiral"?

It's the rapid rotation of the stars around its center that gives our galaxy its shape, which is that of a flattened disk. The origin of the spiral arms is a result of complex gravitational phenomena. The Milky Way, that great luminous arc that crosses the sky at night, is the image of all the stars strewn the length of the disk of the galaxy and revolving around its center: our solar system makes a complete revolution around that center roughly once every two hundred million years. "

Hubert Reeves em Origins, p 58-59, Arcade Publishing, New York, 1998.




imagens da Via Láctea publicadas pela Nasa.



imagem da via láctea pelo fotógrafo Larry Landolfi






A espiral de Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, Utah, 1970.

"Size determines an object, but scale determines art."

"For me scale operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. On eye level, the tail leads one into an undifferentiated state of matter. One's downward gaze pitches form size to size, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the inner and outer edges, while the entire mass echoes the irregular horizons. And each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice. Growth in a crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw. The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiraling crystal lattice, magnified trillions of times..."

Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 1972.



cristais de sal