An Alternative Cosmogony

Title

An Alternative Cosmogony

Artist

Regina Valluzzi

Medium

Digital Art - Digital Art

Description

Based on an Ink drawing, scanned and modified using layers and filters

A digital fantasy evocative of planetary systems, space engineering, design, and cosmogony. Created by layering and altering hand drawn patterns as transparent layers and effects masks.

Cosmogony is a term used to describe different theories for how our Solar System formed - with all of the planets. As a technical term it fell out of use for decades and became nearly extinct until fairly recently with the discoveries of exoplanets orbiting other stars.

I learned about Cosmogony as a little girl reading old Astronomy books written for children. These books were triply out of date as information sources.

Firstly because they were in my hands decades ago and because the field and our ideas about star and planet formation have evolved and changed a lot since I was a child.

Secondly because the books themselves were not new when I was given them. They were fairly old used books from the 1940s 1950s and 1960s.

And thiordly they were out of date because the technical information included in books for children tends to be ideas that have been kicking around for a while and becoming common knowledge. In a fast moving science common knowledge is often already out of date and often wrong.

As a result, there were a variety of weird old cosmogony theories in those books, many of which dated from a time before we understood that the Milky Way was one Galaxy among many other galaxies. Some of these ideas considered planet formation as an extremely rare and unique event, something that happened only in our Solar System.

Ideas like light pressure pushing dust into planetary orbits and coalescing that dist into stars, tiny fluctuations in a gravity driven collapse of dust creating separate bodies, stellar collisions or close flybys, and other wierder explanations abounded.

Now we know that planets surround many stars, perhaps even most stars. Our theories have evolved and will change further with the constant and rapid stream of new information about exoplanets, exoplanetary systems and all the various conditions and orbits and types of stars where they exist.

I still do think back to those old weird ideas trying to explain why the Solar System was uniquely possessed of planets, in a Universe that was not yet understood as extending waaaaaay past the Milky Way. This piece in a way is a reminiscence on those older models and an imagining of what we may yet discover. It is a very alternative and gravitationally unrealistic cosmogony. It conveys a bit of the mystery and the intellectual striving, nearly blinded by lack of available data, of our human understanding of our cosmos.

Uploaded

April 12th, 2018

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