Adam Victor Brandizzi

A diplomacia do primeiro mandato de Dilma Rousseff não teve distinção conceitual daquela implementada pelo ex-presidente Lula.

Ela manteve intactos os elementos centrais.

Primeiro, a busca de relações corretas, não antagônicas, com os Estados Unidos.

Segundo, cooperação ativa com vizinhos na tentativa de transformar a América do Sul num espaço geopolítico próprio e com orientação de esquerda.

Terceiro, o compromisso irreversível com disciplinas internacionais em livre comércio, direitos humanos, meio ambiente, finanças e não proliferação nuclear.

Quarto, ênfase em coalizões com países em desenvolvimento capazes de contestar a visão do Norte sobre governança global de forma moderada, sem rupturas.

Quinto, o alinhamento da máquina do Estado ao projeto de internacionalização do capitalismo brasileiro.

Muitos elementos desse pacote foram herdados de governos prévios ao PT. No entanto, foi com Lula e depois com Dilma que viraram projeto estratégico preciso.

Ajudou para isso a crença segundo a qual a política externa é um campo de batalha bem definido do partido na disputa contra a oposição liderada pelo PSDB.

No entanto, a interseção entre a diplomacia de Lula e a de Dilma em seu primeiro mandato começa e termina aí. Na prática, ao implementar sua política externa no dia a dia, o primeiro mandato de Dilma não representou continuidade em relação a Lula. Por quê?

Alguns dos motivos dizem respeito à política interna. Como Dilma nunca enxergou na diplomacia uma alavanca para ganhar autoridade em casa, o assunto recebeu atenção limitada.

Além disso, Celso Amorim e Marco Aurélio Garcia, os dois pesos-pesados da diplomacia lulista, ficaram no governo, mas encarregados de tocar outras coisas.

Dilma tampouco concebeu a diplomacia como combustível de baixo custo para manter a militância petista e os movimentos sociais energizados.

Em direitos humanos, agiu de olho em Belo Monte e para evitar críticas ao sistema prisional. No quesito LGBT, agiu apenas no fim do mandato, atenta à ameaça de Marina Silva.

Os principais motivos da descontinuidade do mandato de Dilma em relação a Lula foram, acima de tudo, internacionais.

Ela enfrentou um sistema menos maleável e mais hostil. Em seu governo, a crise financeira global bateu com força, o G8 recuperou o terreno perdido para o G20, a América do Sul ficou mais difícil de operar, e as crises de Líbia, Ucrânia, Síria e Estado Islâmico restauraram a agenda das grandes potências, em detrimento dos países emergentes.

O escândalo da espionagem americana e as dificuldades de reviver a OMC só pioraram a situação.

O resultado disso é que a posição relativa do Brasil no mundo em 2014 é pior do que a de 2010.

Pela primeira vez em 20 anos, um governo recém-eleito não pegará o país em trajetória internacional ascendente.

O grupo de colaboradores presidenciais que sairá vitorioso do embate interno nestas oito semanas de transição será forçado a levar essa realidade em conta.

A Justiça de São Paulo concedeu na última sexta-feira (24) liminar (decisão provisória) que proíbe a PM (Polícia Militar) de utilizar armas e balas de borracha para dispersar manifestações.

Agora, a PM paulista tem 30 dias para informar publicamente um plano de ação em protestos de rua, que não inclua o uso deste tipo de equipamento, sob o risco de multa diária no valor de R$ 100 mil, que devem ser imputados ao governo do Estado em caso de descumprimento. Como a medida é liminar, há possibilidade de o governo recorrer.

De acordo com a decisão, há pontos obrigatórios que devem estar inclusos no plano de ação da PM. Além da proibição do uso balas de borracha, todos os envolvidos nas ações de policiamento deverão ter a identificação dos nomes dos policiais afixada na farda de forma visível.O plano de ação das tropas, em caso de necessidade de dispersão, deverá também indicar o nome de quem o ordenou.

A liminar foi concedida pelo juiz Valentino Aparecido de Andrade da 10ª Vara da Fazenda Pública que atendeu as medidas de ação movida pela Defensoria Pública e proposta pela Conectas, uma ONG de defesa de direitos humanos.

 "O objetivo foi reivindicar que a PM aja de forma preventiva e não repressora. Queremos que a polícia garanta esse direito de manifestação de forma inteligente", declarou o defensor público Fabrício Viana.

O documento diz, ainda, que "sprays de pimenta e gases podem eventualmente ser utilizados, mas em casos extremos".

Repercussão

"É uma decisão extremamente positiva e de importância dentro da questão dos direitos humanos. Da legitimidade do direito da manifestação pacífica, um ganho para a sociedade toda", disse o fotógrafo Sérgio Silva, vítima de uma bala de borracha no olho esquerdo, durante uma manifestação no dia 13 de junho do ano passado, em São Paulo.

Devido ao acidente, Silva perdeu o olho esquerdo e hoje usa uma prótese estética no local. "O uso desse tipo de arma tem de obedecer um tipo de regulamento, que na prática não ocorre", disse ele.

Neste ano, o fotógrafo entregou um abaixo-assinado ao secretário de Segurança Pública de São Paulo, Fernando Grella Vieira, que pedia o fim do uso desse tipo de armamento.

"As assinaturas foram recolhidas pela sociedade civil, em um momento em que eu ainda recuperava a minha saúde", disse ele, que segue fazendo acompanhamento médico.

Em nota enviada ao UOL na manhã desta quarta-feira (29), a Secretaria de Segurança Pública do Estado informou que irá recorrer da decisão. "A Polícia Militar de São Paulo atua dentro dos estritos limites da lei e segundo padrões reconhecidos internacionalmente. A decisão judicial é provisória e será enfrentada por recurso próprio", diz a nota.

There’s a sweet, small suburban house in the vineyards of Napa, northern California. Inside, a family of devout Jehovah Witnesses bustles around, offering me a cheese plate. A Siamese cat weaves in and out of my legs. Everything is lovely. Sitting unobtrusively in the corner is 87-year-old Margaret Keane. “Would you like some macadamia nuts?” she asks. She hands me Jehovah Witness pamphlets too. “Jehovah looks after me every day,” she says. “I really feel it.”She is the last person you’d expect to be a participant in one of the great art frauds of the 20th century.

This story begins in Berlin in 1946. A young American named Walter Keane was in Europe to learn how to be a painter. And there he was, staring heartbroken at the big-eyed children fighting over scraps of food in the rubbish. As he would later write: “As if goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, ragged little victims of the war with their bruised, lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.”

Fifteen years laterand Keane was an art sensation. The American suburb had just been invented and millions of people suddenly had a lot of wall space to fill. Some of them – those who wanted their homes to express upbeat whimsy – opted for paintings of dogs playing pool or dogs playing poker. But a great number of others, who wanted something more melancholic, went for Walter’s sad, big-eyed children. Some of the children held sad, big-eyed poodles in their arms. Others sat lonely in fields of flowers. They were dressed as harlequins and ballerinas. They just seemed so innocent and searching.

Walter himself was not a melancholic man. According to his biographers, Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, he was a drinker and a lover – of women and of himself. This, for instance, is how he describes his first meeting with Margaret, the woman now sitting opposite me in Napa. It’s from his 1983 memoir, The World of Keane: “I love your paintings,” she told me. “You are the greatest artist I have ever seen. You are also the most handsome. The children in your paintings are so sad. It hurts my eyes to see them. Your perspective and the sadness you portray in the faces of the children make me want to touch them.”

“No,” I said. “Never touch any of my paintings.”

This conversation apparently took place at an outdoor art exhibition in San Francisco in 1955. Walter was still an unknown artist. He wouldn’t become a phenomenon for another few years. Later that night, his memoir continues, Margaret told him: “You are the greatest lover in the world.” They married.

Margaret’s memory of their first meeting is quite different.

The centre of Walter’s universe in the mid-1950s was a San Francisco beatnik club, The Hungry i. While comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby performed onstage, out at the front, Walter sold his big-eyed-children paintings. One night Margaret decided to go to the club with him.

“He had me sitting in a corner,” she tells me, “and he was over there, talking, selling paintings, when somebody walked over to me and said: ‘Do you paint too?’ And I suddenly thought – just horrible shock – ‘Is he taking credit for my paintings?’”

He was. He had been telling his patrons a giant lie. Margaret was the painter of the big eyes – every one of them. Walter might well have seen sad children in postwar Berlin, but he hadn’t painted them, because he couldn’t paint to save his life.

Margaret was furious. Back home she confronted him. She told him to stop. But something unexpected happened instead. During the decade that followed, Margaret would nod in respectful admiration as Walter told interviewers that he was the best painter of eyes since El Greco. She said nothing. Why did she go along with it? What was happening inside the Keane marriage?

Margaret takes me back to the beginning. It’s true that he charmed her at that art exhibition in 1955, she says. “He was just oozing with charm. He could charm anyone.” But the rest of the conversation didn’t happen. How could it have?

Their first two years were happy, but all that changed the night of the Hungry i. “Back home he tried to explain it away,” she says. “He said: ‘We need the money. People are more likely to buy a painting if they think they’re talking to the artist. People don’t want to think I can’t paint and need to have my wife paint. People already think I painted the big eyes and if I suddenly say it was you, it’ll be confusing and people will start suing us.’ He was telling me all these horrible problems.”

Walter offered Margaret a solution: “Teach me how to paint the big-eyed children.” So she tried. “And when he couldn’t do it, it was my fault. ‘You’re not teaching me right. I could do it if you had more patience.’ I was really trying, but it was just impossible.”

Margaret felt trapped. She wanted to leave, but she didn’t know how. How would she support herself and her daughter? “So finally I went along with it,” she says. “And it was just tearing me apart.”

By the early 1960s, Keane prints and postcards were selling in the millions. You couldn’t walk into a Woolworths without seeing racks of them. Luminaries including Natalie Wood, Joan Crawford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Kim Novak were buying the originals.

“Did you see any of the money?” I ask Margaret.

“No,” she says. “I just painted. But we moved to a nice house. There was a swimming pool. Gated. Servants. So I didn’t need to do anything except paint.” She smiles, ruefully. Outside in the sun, Walter was living the high life. “There was always three or four people swimming nude in the pool,” he wrote in his memoir. “Everybody was screwing everybody. Sometimes I’d be going to bed and there’d be three girls in the bed.” The Beach Boys would visit, and Maurice Chevalier, and Howard Keel. But Margaret rarely saw them, because she was painting 16 hours a day.

“Did the servants know what was going on?”

“No, the door was always locked,” she says. “The curtains closed.”

“You spent all those years with the curtains closed?”

“When he wasn’t home he’d usually call every hour to make sure I hadn’t gone out,” she says. “I was in jail.”

“Did you know about the affairs?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t care what he did by then.”

“It must have been lonely.”

“Yes, because he wouldn’t allow me to have any friends. If I tried to slip away from him, he’d follow me. We had a chihuahua and because I loved that little dog so much, he kicked it, and so finally I had to give the dog away. He was very jealous and domineering. And all along he said: ‘If you ever tell anyone I’m going to have you knocked off.’ I knew he knew a lot of mafia people. He really scared me. He tried to hit me once. But I said, ‘Where I come from men don’t hit women. If you ever do that again I’ll leave.’” She pauses. “But I let him do everything else, which was even worse probably.”

“Would he come home from his partying and demand you show him what you’d painted?” I ask.

“He was always pressuring me to do more,” she says. “‘Do one with a clown costume.’ Or: ‘Do two children on a rocking horse.’ One day he had this idea that I’d do this huge painting, his masterwork, to hang in the United Nations or somewhere. I had a month to do that.”

The “masterwork” was called Tomorrow Forever. It depicted a hundred sad-looking, big-eyed children of all creeds standing in a line that stretches to the horizon. The organisers of the 1964 World’s Fair hung it in their Pavilion of Education. Walter felt deeply proud of the achievement. He wrote in his memoir that his dead grandmother told him in a vision that “Michelangelo has put your name up for nomination as a member of our inner circle saying that your masterwork Tomorrow Forever will live in the hearts and minds of men as has his work on the Sistine chapel.”

The art critic John Canaday reviewed Tomorrow Forever for the New York Times: “This tasteless hack work contains about 100 children and hence it is about 100 times as bad as the average Keane.” Stung by the review, the World’s Fair took down the painting.

“Walter was furious,” Margaret says. “I felt hurt that they didn’t want it and were saying nasty things. When people said it was just sentimental stuff it really hurt my feelings. Some people couldn’t stand to even look at them. I don’t know why - just a violent reaction. But so many people really love them. Little children love them. Even babies. So eventually I thought: ‘I don’t care. I’m just going to paint what I want to paint.’”

If you’d asked Margaret back then about her inspiration – which you never would have, of course – she would have shrugged and said she didn’t know. The paintings just flowed out of her. But now, she says, she thinks she understands: “Those sad children were really my own deep feelings that I couldn’t express in any other way. Their eyes were searching. Asking why. Why is there so much sadness? Why do we have to get sick and die? Why do people shoot each other?”

“Why is my husband so crazy?” I suggest. “Why did I get into this mess?” Margaret nods.

After 10 years of marriage, eight of them horrific, they divorced. Margaret promised Walter that she’d keep on secretly painting for him. And she did for a while. But after she’d delivered maybe 20 or 30 big eyes to him, she suddenly thought: “No more lies. From now on, I will only ever tell the truth.”

Which is why, in October 1970, Margaret told a reporter from the UPI everything. “He wanted to learn to paint,” she revealed, “and I tried to teach him to paint when he was home, which wasn’t often. He couldn’t even learn to paint.”

And so on. Walter went on the offensive, swearing that the big eyes were his and calling Margaret a “boozing, sex-starved psychopath” who he once discovered having sex with several parking-lot attendants.

“He was really nuts,” Margaret says. “I couldn’t believe he had so much hate for me.”

Margaret became a Jehovah’s Witness. She moved to Hawaii and started painting big-eyed children swimming in azure seas with tropical fish. In these Hawaii paintings you can see small, cautious smiles begin to form on the faces of the children. Walter’s life wasn’t so happy. He moved to a fisherman’s shack in La Jolla, California, and began to drink from morning until night. He told the few reporters still interested in him that Margaret was in league with the Jehovah’s Witnesses to defraud him. One reporter, from USA Today, believed every word, and they ran a story on Walter’s plight: “Thinking he was dead [Margaret] claimed to have done some of the Keane paintings. The claim, vehemently denied by a very much alive Keane, is in litigation.”

Margaret sued Walter. The judge challenged them both to paint a child with big eyes, right there in court, in front of everyone. Margaret painted hers in 53 minutes. Walter said he couldn’t because he had a sore shoulder.

“And there it is,” she tells me. She points to a framed portrait on the wall of a little girl with absolutely huge eyes, peering out nervously from behind a fence. “I painted it in Honolulu federal court. It has the exhibit number on the back.”

In fact the walls of Margaret’s home are filled with big-eye paintings – children, poodles, kittens. There’s barely an inch of empty wall space.

“That painting is symbolic of her triumph over the lies,” Margaret’s son-in-law tells me as he walks past us towards the kitchen.

Margaret won the court case, of course. She was awarded $4m, but she never saw a penny of it because Walter had drunk his fortune away. A court psychologist diagnosed him with a rare mental condition called delusional disorder. I ask Margaret if she knows anything about delusional disorder. She shakes her head and says she can’t even remember Walter being diagnosed with it.

“It’s when a person who is otherwise completely normal has a particular delusion they’re absolutely convinced of,” I say. “Quite often it’s a jealous husband convinced his wife is cheating on him. Sometimes the person is convinced that some impostor is taking credit for their genius.”

“I didn’t know that,” Margaret says.

“If you have the disorder it means you truly believe it,” I say.

Margaret thinks. “For a long time I felt very guilty about it,” she says.

“Why guilty?” I ask.

“If I hadn’t allowed him to take credit for the paintings, he wouldn’t have got as sick as he got.”

Walter died in 2000. He gave up drinking towards the end, but you get the sense that he missed those days, writing in his memoir that sobriety was his “new awakening, away from the drinking world of exciting sexy beautiful women, parties and art buyers”. By the 1970s, the big eyes had fallen from favour. Woody Allen mocked them in Sleeper, imagining a ridiculous future where they were revered.

But now, suddenly, there is a kind of renaissance. A Tim Burton biopic, Big Eyes, is about to be released, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Margaret has a cameo: “I’m a little old lady sitting on a park bench.”

“Was the film distressing to watch?” I ask her.

“It was really traumatic,” she says. “I really think I was in shock for a couple of days. Christoph Waltz – he looks like Walter, sounds like him, acts like him. And to see Amy going through what I went through … It’s very accurate. Then it started to dawn on me how fantastic the movie is.”

Margaret smiles, looking thrilled, and I realise that sometimes a wrong is so great it needs something as dramatic as a major biopic in which you’re the hero to heal the wounds.

• Big Eyes will be released in the UK on 26 December.

Every year, around about this time, thousands of European robins escape the oncoming harsh Scandinavian winter and head south to the warmer Mediterranean coasts. How they find their way unerringly on this 2,000-mile journey is one of the true wonders of the natural world. For unlike many other species of migratory birds, marine animals and even insects, they do not rely on landmarks, ocean currents, the position of the sun or a built-in star map. Instead, they are among a select group of animals that use a remarkable navigation sense – remarkable for two reasons. The first is that they are able to detect tiny variations in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field – astonishing in itself, given that this magnetic field is 100 times weaker than even that of a measly fridge magnet. The second is that robins seem to be able to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field via a process that even Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky”. The birds’ in-built compass appears to make use of one of the strangest features of quantum mechanics.

Over the past few years, the European robin, and its quantum “sixth sense”, has emerged as the pin-up for a new field of research, one that brings together the wonderfully complex and messy living world and the counterintuitive, ethereal but strangely orderly world of atoms and elementary particles in a collision of disciplines that is as astonishing and unexpected as it is exciting. Welcome to the new science of quantum biology.

Most people have probably heard of quantum mechanics, even if they don’t really know what it is about. Certainly, the idea that it is a baffling and difficult scientific theory understood by just a tiny minority of smart physicists and chemists has become part of popular culture. Quantum mechanics describes a reality on the tiniest scales that is, famously, very weird indeed; a world in which particles can exist in two or more places at once, spread themselves out like ghostly waves, tunnel through impenetrable barriers and even possess instantaneous connections that stretch across vast distances.

But despite this bizarre description of the basic building blocks of the universe, quantum mechanics has been part of all our lives for a century. Its mathematical formulation was completed in the mid-1920s and has given us a remarkably complete account of the world of atoms and their even smaller constituents, the fundamental particles that make up our physical reality. For example, the ability of quantum mechanics to describe the way that electrons arrange themselves within atoms underpins the whole of chemistry, material science and electronics; and is at the very heart of most of the technological advances of the past half-century. Without the success of the equations of quantum mechanics in describing how electrons move through materials such as semiconductors we would not have developed the silicon transistor and, later, the microchip and the modern computer.

However, if quantum mechanics can so beautifully and accurately describe the behaviour of atoms with all their accompanying weirdness, then why aren’t all the objects we see around us, including us – which are after all only made up of these atoms – also able to be in two place at once, pass through impenetrable barriers or communicate instantaneously across space? One obvious difference is that the quantum rules apply to single particles or systems consisting of just a handful of atoms, whereas much larger objects consist of trillions of atoms bound together in mindboggling variety and complexity. Somehow, in ways we are only now beginning to understand, most of the quantum weirdness washes away ever more quickly the bigger the system is, until we end up with the everyday objects that obey the familiar rules of what physicists call the “classical world”. In fact, when we want to detect the delicate quantum effects in everyday-size objects we have to go to extraordinary lengths to do so – freezing them to within a whisker of absolute zero and performing experiments in near-perfect vacuums.

Quantum effects were certainly not expected to play any role inside the warm, wet and messy world of living cells, so most biologists have thus far ignored quantum mechanics completely, preferring their traditional ball-and-stick models of the molecular structures of life. Meanwhile, physicists have been reluctant to venture into the messy and complex world of the living cell; why should they when they can test their theories far more cleanly in the controlled environment of the lab where they at least feel they have a chance of understanding what is going on?

Yet, 70 years ago, the Austrian Nobel prize-winning physicist and quantum pioneer, Erwin Schrödinger, suggested in his famous book, What is Life?, that, deep down, some aspects of biology must be based on the rules and orderly world of quantum mechanics. His book inspired a generation of scientists, including the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA, Francis Crick and James Watson. Schrödinger proposed that there was something unique about life that distinguishes it from the rest of the non-living world. He suggested that, unlike inanimate matter, living organisms can somehow reach down to the quantum domain and utilise its strange properties in order to operate the extraordinary machinery within living cells.

Schrödinger’s argument was based on the paradoxical fact that the laws of classical physics, such as those of Newtonian mechanics and thermodynamics, are ultimately based on disorder. Consider a balloon. It is filled with trillions of molecules of air all moving entirely randomly, bumping into one another and the inside wall of the balloon. Each molecule is governed by orderly quantum laws, but when you add up the random motions of all the molecules and average them out, their individual quantum behaviour washes out and you are left with the gas laws that predict, for example, that the balloon will expand by a precise amount when heated. This is because heat energy makes the air molecules move a little bit faster, so that they bump into the walls of the balloon with a bit more force, pushing the walls outward a little bit further. Schrödinger called this kind of law “order from disorder” to reflect the fact that this apparent macroscopic regularity depends on random motion at the level of individual particles.

But what about life? Schrödinger pointed out that many of life’s properties, such as heredity, depend of molecules made of comparatively few particles – certainly too few to benefit from the order-from-disorder rules of thermodynamics. But life was clearly orderly. Where did this orderliness come from? Schrödinger suggested that life was based on a novel physical principle whereby its macroscopic order is a reflection of quantum-level order, rather than the molecular disorder that characterises the inanimate world. He called this new principle “order from order”. But was he right?

Up until a decade or so ago, most biologists would have said no. But as 21st-century biology probes the dynamics of ever-smaller systems – even individual atoms and molecules inside living cells – the signs of quantum mechanical behaviour in the building blocks of life are becoming increasingly apparent. Recent research indicates that some of life’s most fundamental processes do indeed depend on weirdness welling up from the quantum undercurrent of reality. Here are a few of the most exciting examples.

Enzymes are the workhorses of life. They speed up chemical reactions so that processes that would otherwise take thousands of years proceed in seconds inside living cells. Life would be impossible without them. But how they accelerate chemical reactions by such enormous factors, often more than a trillion-fold, has been an enigma. Experiments over the past few decades, however, have shown that enzymes make use of a remarkable trick called quantum tunnelling to accelerate biochemical reactions. Essentially, the enzyme encourages electrons and protons to vanish from one position in a biomolecule and instantly rematerialise in another, without passing through the gap in between – a kind of quantum teleportation.

And before you throw your hands up in incredulity, it should be stressed that quantum tunnelling is a very familiar process in the subatomic world and is responsible for such processes as radioactive decay of atoms and even the reason the sun shines (by turning hydrogen into helium through the process of nuclear fusion). Enzymes have made every single biomolecule in your cells and every cell of every living creature on the planet, so they are essential ingredients of life. And they dip into the quantum world to help keep us alive.

Another vital process in biology is of course photosynthesis. Indeed, many would argue that it is the most important biochemical reaction on the planet, responsible for turning light, air, water and a few minerals into grass, trees, grain, apples, forests and, ultimately, the rest of us who eat either the plants or the plant-eaters.

The initiating event is the capture of light energy by a chlorophyll molecule and its conversion into chemical energy that is harnessed to fix carbon dioxide and turn it into plant matter. The process whereby this light energy is transported through the cell has long been a puzzle because it can be so efficient – close to 100% and higher than any artificial energy transport process.

The first step in photosynthesis is the capture of a tiny packet of energy from sunlight that then has to hop through a forest of chlorophyll molecules to makes its way to a structure called the reaction centre where its energy is stored. The problem is understanding how the packet of energy appears to so unerringly find the quickest route through the forest. An ingenious experiment, first carried out in 2007 in Berkley, California, probed what was going on by firing short bursts of laser light at photosynthetic complexes. The research revealed that the energy packet was not hopping haphazardly about, but performing a neat quantum trick. Instead of behaving like a localised particle travelling along a single route, it behaves quantum mechanically, like a spread-out wave, and samples all possible routes at once to find the quickest way.

A third example of quantum trickery in biology – the one we introduced in our opening paragraph – is the mechanism by which birds and other animals make use of the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation. Studies of the European robin suggest that it has an internal chemical compass that utilises an astonishing quantum concept called entanglement, which Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance”. This phenomenon describes how two separated particles can remain instantaneously connected via a weird quantum link. The current best guess is that this takes place inside a protein in the bird’s eye, where quantum entanglement makes a pair of electrons highly sensitive to the angle of orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing the bird to “see” which way it needs to fly.

All these quantum effects have come as a big surprise to most scientists who believed that the quantum laws only applied in the microscopic world. All delicate quantum behaviour was thought to be washed away very quickly in bigger objects, such as living cells, containing the turbulent motion of trillions of randomly moving particles. So how does life manage its quantum trickery? Recent research suggests that rather than avoiding molecular storms, life embraces them, rather like the captain of a ship who harnesses turbulent gusts and squalls to maintain his ship upright and on course.

Just as Schrödinger predicted, life seems to be balanced on the boundary between the sensible everyday world of the large and the weird and wonderful quantum world, a discovery that is opening up an exciting new field of 21st-century science.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe McFadden will be published by Bantam Press on 6 November. Click here to buy it for £15

A victim of San Francisco’s Preparedness Day Parade bombing; Online Archive of California

On the afternoon of July 22, 1916, thousands of San Franciscans gathered along Market Street for what was advertised as the “grandest parade of the century.”

Nearly 100,000 people from all across the western states came to see the impressive procession of 51,329 marchers, 2,134 participating organizations, and 52 bands. Giddy, balloon-clutching children jumped with joy, parents bantered about the war raging overseas, and vendors slithered through the masses, peddling commemorative pins for a nickel. As fog horns bellowed from the bay, cheers and whistles echoed down Market Street. On this Saturday afternoon, spirits were high.

Then, a bomb exploded.

Hoards of concerned citizens scrambled for safety, children shrieked -- not with joy, but terror -- and the cavalcade came to an unceremonious halt. By the time the chaos had subsided, 10 lay dead. More than 40 others were left gravely wounded, including one young girl who “had her legs blown clear off.”

The incident would prove to be the deadliest act of terrorism in San Francisco history. Unbeknownst to the city’s residents, it would also result in a decades-long miscarriage of justice by police, prosecutors, and political figureheads.

This is the story of the Preparedness Day Bombing -- a cautionary tale of not only terrorism, but the complete suspension of civil rights.

The Preparedness Movement

A U.S. Preparedness ad, 1916

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, the United States made an effort to bolster its army. In 1915, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt launched the “Preparedness Movement,” a campaign that called for the “need to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes.” Backed by the nation’s most elite bankers, industrialists, and lawyers, it quickly gained steam.

On June 3, 1916 -- a mere seven weeks prior to the San Francisco bombing -- President Woodrow Wilson enacted the National Defense Act of 1916, authorizing the expansion of the Army by 175,000 men, and the National Guard by 450,000. Proponents of the act championed “economic strength and military muscle” over the myriad of national concerns that needed to be addressed; it soon became patently clear that the nation was bracing itself to enter the war.

To support these efforts and mobilize citizens, cities across the United States staged grand parades. In San Francisco, most people were anti-preparedness and isolationists (against foreign involvement); nonetheless, the city decided to participate.

In the midst of this, San Francisco also faced intense unrest. A small but potent minority of labor leaders and organizations strongly opposed the emerging war effort, and were none too pleased with the news of the parade. Throughout June of 1916, they disseminated eerily foreboding pamphlets to potential parade-goers, warning of their intentions to attack:

"We are going to use a little direct action on the 22nd [at the parade] to show that militarism can't be forced on us and our children without a violent protest." 

To combat these threats, the city’s Chamber of Commerce organized a special Law and Order Committee -- but in a time where terrorism wasn’t taken too seriously, plans for the parade moved forward.

Tragedy Strikes

Morale was high and patriotism abundant as the day of the parade approached. 

A week before the event, the San Francisco Chronicle published a full-page picture of the “Goddess of Preparedness,” including a set of unintentionally foreboding instructions; in them, it was declared that the festivities would commence with the blasting of a “bomb” (likely, just a firecracker):

“San Francisco will shout a full-throated salute during the preparedness parade when the second bomb is fired, which will be the signal for the bands to play ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ When this signal is given, every whistle in the city will open its valve and shriek patriotically.”

San Francisco Chronicle, June 20, 1916 (two days before the bombing); LHM

According to plan, ceremonies commenced just after the “bomb” sound, at 1:40 PM on Saturday, July 22, 1916. Set to last 3.5 hours, it was, by all accounts, the largest parade the city had ever organized -- and one of the largest in United States history. 

But at 2:06 PM -- less than 30 minutes into the parade -- an unknown assailant left a suitcase packed with timed explosives and steel slugs on the sidewalk at the intersection of Steuart and Market streets, just minutes from the city’s famous Ferry Building. 

Moments later, an actual bomb exploded.

Eight people close to the explosion were killed instantly; two more died of grave shrapnel wounds en route to the hospital. The sidewalk was “littered with bodies,” according to one recount -- some 40 lay wounded in various states. And as the masses panicked and cleared Market Street, investigators frantically embarked on a hunt for the perpetrator.

Crowds of San Franciscans gather around the site of the explosion

Investigators survey the scene of the bomb

Over the next four days, authorities honed their search to known San Francisco labor radicals -- those who were anti-war and championed the Marxist belief that violence may be necessary to invoke social change.

The media joined in, encouraging citizens to be on the hunt for such “socialists.” Hearst-Pathe News, which had a stronghold on San Francisco’s media at the time, produced a brief, propaganda-esque film, insinuating that anarchists or communists were to blame. “Wake up San Francisco,” it beckoned, “and save our city from further disgrace!” Interposed with images of Labor party meetings, the words “anarchy,” “sedition,” and “lawlessness” flashed across the screen:

Almost instantly, two radicals -- Thomas J. Mooney and his assistant, Warren Billings -- were targeted for questioning. Both had long been tracked by the police for their involvement in various “socialist shenanigans:” Mooney for “conspiring to dynamite power lines” at a 1913 strike, and Billings for bringing dynamite on a train. Both had previously been cleared of all charges for lack of evidence, but investigators were constantly looking for a way to imprison them. They were, as described by one publication, “San Francisco’s most hunted radicals.”

Mooney was especially hated by police. The son of Irish immigrants, had spent a few years as an industrial worker before traveling to Europe and becoming an self-proclaimed socialist and labor leader. He eventually returned, settled in San Francisco, and published The Revolt, a widely-disseminated socialist paper; soon he’d become known for his radical tendencies. By the early 1900s, The Chicago Tribune had described him as “the foremost labor radical in San Francisco -- an energetic organizer, an anarchist, a strike leader...and a militant pacifist.”

On what would turn out to be very little evidence, the city’s District Attorney, Charles Fickert, pegged them as the culprits. 

On July 26 and 27, he had Mooney and Billings arrested, along with Mooney’s wife and two fellow trade-unionists -- Israel Weinberg (a taxi driver by trade), and  Edward Nolan, then-President of the Machinists’ Lodge. 

San Francisco’s Sacco and Vanzetti

From the start, the process was horribly misconducted.

All five were arrested without warrants. Offered no explanation for their detainment, the suspects’ homes were then raided by Swanson and his task force. When a trace amount of powder was discovered in Nolan’s basement, it was instantly identified, with no ballistic testing, as saltpeter used to craft the parade bomb (later, it would be revealed that it was merely bath salt). The suspects were placed in solitary confinement, where they were denied all access to counsel for nearly a week.

Thomas Mooney, the radical labor leader, was treated to an especially hostile examination. Over the course of six days, he was interrogated relentlessly -- despite asking for his attorney some forty-one times.

Meanwhile, a lynch mob mentality permeated San Francisco. For a long while, shop owners has resented the labor unionizers, who they claimed interfered with their ability to maintain “open shop,” or freedom from unions. When they caught news that Mooney -- their worst enemy -- was a suspect, they were more than eager to go along for the ride.

Mooney and his wife, Billings, Weinberg, and Nolan were corralled to a swift sentencing on August 1, 1916. They were not permitted to “clean themselves up,” and arrived, haggard, unshaven, and foul-smelling. 

Still left without the right to counsel, they refused to testify on their own behalf.

Crowds gather for Mooney's pre-trial

Though hundreds of people had been at the intersection of Steuart and Market streets when the bomb exploded, the only witness the prosecutor could conjure to speak before the Grand Jury was a “ne’er-do-well waiter and drug addict” named John McDonald, whose recollections of the event were so garbled and inaccurate that he was called off the stand after only a few questions. Somehow, this was enough to convince the Grand Jury of the suspects’ involvement: each of the five were indicted with ten counts of murder.

Soon afterward, the cases against Mooney’s wife, Weinberg, and Nolan were dismissed: it became clear that the prosecutors were solely interested in taking down Mooney and Billings.

District Attorney Fickert, who led prosecution, soon formulated a theory of the bombing’s events: Mooney and Billings had met at Mooney’s residence, 721 Market Street (nearly a mile from the scene of the crime), and initially planned to drop the bomb from the building’s roof, but had changed their minds at the last minute; they then drove to down Market Street, and planted the bomb on the sidewalk. Any testimonies from witnesses that did not fit into this unfounded sequence of events were flat out ignored or dismissed by prosecutors.

Finally provided city-appointed defense attorneys, the two proceeded to separate trials.

Billings’ trial came first. In September 1916, following a very brief deliberation by the jury, he was found guilty of murder in the second degree and sentenced to life in prison. A motion for retrial was curtly dismissed, and with little publicity, he was sent to Folsom -- the state’s most notorious prison.

Mooney’s initial trial, over the course of January and February of 1916, was a much grander affair. During the trial, many witnesses were called -- all of whom were disreputable characters: a “tramp waiter,” a felon, a prostitute, and a cattle rancher from Oregon named Frank C. Oxman. Oxman, the “star witness,” claimed to have seen Mooney at the scene of the crime; quickly, it was declared that the entire trial “hinged on his statements.” 

Though all of these testimonies were full of contradictions and didn’t seem to line up with one another, District Attorney Fickert championed them as the truth. 

Just before the trial, the prosecutors had obtained a photograph supposedly showing Mooney on his roof at the time of the crime; fearing it would discredit their argument, they attempted to hide it. When the defense team learned of the photo’s existence, the prosecutors did everything in their power to deny access. A case study from the American Civil Liberties Union elaborates:

“When the defense demanded the photo, the prosecution claimed it was unable to produce it and furnished blurred enlargements. A large jeweler’s street clock appeared in the picture, but the time could not be read from the enlargement the prosecution furnished.”

A photo showing the figure of Mooney (red circle) atop his residence at 2:10 PM -- five minutes before the bombing. The original, of much higher quality, was only released by prosecutors 30 years after the trial.

During Mooney’s trial, the photo was analyzed by experts and it was determined to have been taken at 2:01 PM -- just five minutes prior to the bombing. As Market street was clogged with traffic on the day of the parade, it would’ve been impossible for Mooney to plant the bomb and make it back to his place that quickly. In light of this evidence, the prosecutors’ witnesses began flip-flopping their testimonies, claiming they’d seen Mooney earlier than previously stated.

Despite all of these inconsistencies, Mooney was convicted with first-degree murder and sentenced to death by hanging.

When a “Star Witness” is a Perjurer

Initially, Frank Oxman, the prosecution's “star” witness, had donned the impression of a trusted witness in the courtroom, as noted by Judge Griffin, who presided over the case:

“His testimony was unshaken on cross examination, and his very appearance...was of a reputable and prosperous cattle dealer and landowner. This is no question but that he made a sound impression upon the jury and upon all those who listened to his story on the witness stand. He was the pivot around which all other evidence in the case revolved.”

But in April, two months after Mooney’s trial, it became startlingly clear that Oxman was a shady character. In a letter he’d written just before the initial proceedings, he’d bribed his friend from Illinois -- a man he hadn’t seen in some twenty years -- to travel out west and act as a witness (note: printed here in original form, including atrocious grammar and spelling):

“Cum to San Frico as a expurt wittness in a very important case. You will only hafto answer 3 or 4 questiones and I will post you on them. You will get mileage and all that a witness can draw -- probly 100 in cleare so if you will come ans me quick in care of this hotel I will manage a balance.”

When the man heeded Oxman’s call and came to California, he soon discovered that Oxman wanted him to “perjure himself to convict an innocent man.” He refused, and in turn turned the letters over the Mooney’s lawyers, he swiftly appealed the convict’s sentence and demanded a retrial. The appeal was accepted, and a new case opened -- this time to be tried before California’s Supreme Court.

Soon after, Oxman’s testimony that he’d seen Mooney commit the crime came under fire again. A couple from Sacramento, California - nearly 90 miles from San Francisco -- came forward that they’d had Oxman as a guest in their home. On the day of the explosion, he’d left the capital on a train at 2:15 PM, and hadn’t arrived in Bay Area until 5:21 PM -- three hours after the bombing. According to hospitality records, he’d then checked into a hotel at 5:30. The “star” witness apparently had never even been at the scene of the crime!

Frank C. Oxman, the prosecutors' "star witness"

When Judge Griffin (who’d presided over the initial case) learned that Oxman had not only bribed witnesses, but flat-out lied under oath, he became enraged, and sent a letter to the state Attorney General: “Had these letters been before me at the time of the trial,” he wrote, “I would have unhesitantly [exonerated] Mooney.” In turn, the Attorney General assured Griffin that “justice would be subserved.”

But the State Supreme Court, limited by technicalities, made it clear they did not agree. “Manifestly, the court has no authority to consider these matters,” they responded. “There is no provision of law by which newly discovered evidence may be presented to this court in the first instance.” Mooney’s lawyers were also tied up: “statutory restrictions” required that new evidence be presented within a “short time period” -- and that had expired.

Only the Governor could pardon Mooney, and he was wholly uninterested in doing so.

In the midst of Mooney’s legal battle, Oxman faced his own trial -- for both subordination and perjury -- and was embraced much more favorably by the court. District Attorney Fickert, who’d reigned over the Mooney trial and had commandeered Oxman and other witnesses, paid for the man’s defense. In court, Oxman argued there had been another page in the letter in which he’d told his friend not to come up unless he’d actually been at the bombing (ostensibly another lie under oath). 

By all accounts, Fickert had “whitewashed” and bribed the jury: Oxman was promptly acquitted, and Fickert himself was commended by the jury for his “exceptional ability to bring justice to light.”

Despite evidence of a clearly tainted trial, Mooney still faced death. Labor radicals around the United States grew increasingly agitated, and organized a series of protests demanding his release:

Labor protestors line the streets of San Francisco in defense of Mooney and Billings.

The Iron Molders’ Union of Seattle protests Mooney’s imprisonment

Throughout the summer of 1917, hundreds of mass meetings, protests were organized. Major unions -- the Machinists’ Lodge, the Iron Molders’ Association, and United Steelworkers -- chose to strike, halting a large sector of the economy. Of 240 big unions outside of industrial centers, 220 participated in Mooney’s cause.

In San Francisco, citizens became aware of District Attorney Fickert’s shady involvement -- both in the trials of Mooney and Oxman -- and began to petition for his removal from office. The efforts did not pay off; in December of 1917, Fickert was re-elected. When several non-lethal explosions were detonated in protest, Mooney delivered a directive from his San Quentin prison cell: “Bombs will NOT benefit my cause,” he told labor activists, “but hurt it beyond measure.”

The case even spread internationally. Russia, at the time going through a period of revolution under the leadership of socialist Alexander Kerensky, took great pity on Mooney’s plight. Before the Russian U.S. Embassy, mass demonstrations took place, and the case made headlines across the world.  

At this point, sensing a dangerous uprising, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson took matters into his own hands. Toward the tail end of 1917, he formed what he called a “Mediation Commission,” headed by Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson, and sent the team to San Francisco to investigate the case.

“There can be no doubt that Mooney was registered as a labor agitator of malevolence by the public officials of San Francisco,” reported Wilson, “and that they undoubtedly ‘sought’ to get him.” Wilson continued, noting “the dubious character of the witnesses,” and the overall lack of justice in the trial. In light of this report, President Wilson ordered that California’s Governor, WIlliam Stephens, postpone Mooney’s execution.

For nearly a year, Stephens dilly-dallied, and Mooney’s execution grew more imminent. Finally, on November 28, 1918, after multiple curt telegrams directly  from the President, Stephens upheld his “duty of justice” of Governor -- but Mooney’s sentence was merely commuted from death to life imprisonment, and his impending Supreme Court case was dismissed.

The Terror of Injustice

Thomas Mooney being interviewed by a reporter in a staged photo, late 1930s

For the next 22 years, Thomas Mooney and his assistant, Warren Billings -- both innocent men -- sat rotting in prison.

Over two decades, Mooney submitted dozens of petitions for a retrial, but they were of no use: under legal constraints, the only means by which he could be cleared of his sentence was a pardon from the Governor, or the President. Governor Stephens, who was reluctant to merely commute the man’s sentence in the first place -- even with orders from the POTUS -- wholly ignored his requests.

In 1919, John B. Densmore, a special agent of the Department of Labor, decided to take the case into his own hands. Without the authorities’ permission, he conducted a secret investigation of the case by placing a dictaphone (early recording device) in the office of District Attorney Fickert. What he revealed, in an interview with the Times, was appalling: 

“The plain truth is there is nothing about the case to produce a feeling of confidence that the dignity and majesty of the law have been upheld. There is nowhere anything resembling consistency...manipulation and perjury are rampant. This is a total absence of anything that looks like a genuine effort.”

The new evidence did not entice Governor Stephens to act. Friend Richardson, who succeeded Stephens in 1923, likewise had no sympathy for Mooney -- even when incredibly shady information regarding Mooney’s trial came to light.

In a 1926 report, it was revealed that another witness in the case, Mrs. Kidwell, had cut a deal with police: she’d testified against Mooney (with no knowledge of the day’s events), in exchange for a promise to release her imprisoned husband. “You know I am needed as a witness,” she’d written in a letter to her lover, “and they are helping me by getting you out.” Estelle Smith, another witness, admitted that she’d been ordered to “rehearse” her perjury by prosecutors under the threat of imprisonment for prostitution. A third witness, Mrs. Edeau,  later admitted that only her “astral,” or spiritual, body had been present at the parade; she was later deemed mentally unstable by the state.

Evidence of perjury was so abundant and obvious, that Judge Griffin, who’d presided over the initial case nearly a decade prior, called it “the worst abuse of justice” he’d ever seen. In a statement, he discredited every single witness’s testimony:

“Damned near every witness who testified [against Mooney] before me was perjurious or mistaken. Estelle Smith has admitted her testimony was false. The Edeaus were completely discredited. Oxman [the ‘star witness’] is completely out of the case. John McDonald has since sworn...that he knew nothing about the crime.”

Still, Governor Richardson did not act, and Mooney continued to serve his life sentence.

Justice -- 22 Years Late

Thomas Mooney smiles upon his release

By 1937, a succession of five California Governors had refused to review Mooney’s case. He was at the end of his wits.  It was a “Dickensian nightmare,” the San Francisco Chronicle wroteof his plight, “one of the lowest points in the history of California law.” 

Finally, When Governor Culbert Olson assumed office in January 1939, Mooney was granted justice. 

“I am impressed by the fact that many thousands of Californians still believe Mooney is guilty,” Olson told reporters. “I am also impressed by the fact that five of my predecessors have not pardoned him. A hearing was ordered for Mooney’s pardon. Before a packed court of nearly 500 people, the Governor asked if anyone objected. For a full thirty seconds, he stood in silence, scanning the quieted room: no one spoke. The state officials and prosecutors who’d tirelessly -- and unjustly -- fought against Mooney for more than twenty years were nowhere to be seen. (Charles Fickert, the District Attorney who’d so inappropriately fought for Mooney’s near life-long detention, had devolved into a drunken gambler, lost his savings, and passed away in a few years prior.)

Thomas Mooney’s family and supporters await the result of his pardoning

“I now hand to you, Tom Mooney,” said the Governor, “this full pardon.” Cheers erupted: for two minutes, the room presented Mooney with a standing ovation. As flashbulbs popped, Mooney’s  wife, who’d been acquitted of the same charge decades before and had stood by her husband’s side all the while, burst into tears, and the two embraced. 

Lifting his hand to the crowd, he addressed the court:

“Governor, I shall dedicate the rest of my life to work for the common good in the bond of democracy. Dark and sinister forces of Fascist reactionism are destroying the world. The present economics system is in a state of decay -- not just here ,but throughout the world. I pledge my efforts to the work of the common good.”

Mooney, declared the New York Times, “was free at last.”

Lasting Significance

A mural at San Francisco’s Rincon Center depicts the bombing and Mooney’s unjust imprisonment (far right); painted by Anton Refregier

The first thing Thomas Mooney did was visit the grave of his mother, who’d passed away while he was imprisoned. 

Then, wasting no time, Mooney turned his efforts to freeing his friend, Warren Billings, who’d also been wrongly imprisoned the whole time, but with less attention. After 22 years of unsuccessful appeals, this proved shockingly easy: since Mooney was pardoned, there was no longer any justification for holding Billings and he was released 10 months later.

In a symbolic gesture, Mooney then organized a parade up Market Street -- the spot in San Francisco that the bombing had occurred decades before. He was accompanied by a fleet of a hundred longshoremen, as well as a troupe of labor unions; police and politicians were strictly forbidden from participating. As he trotted through the streets, he “thumbed his nose” at the Hearst building -- the media corporation that had denigrated him relentlessly at the onset of his trial. 

But Mooney’s time in prison had taken a toll on him. Now 59 years old, he suffered from jaundice, ulcers, and diabetes. While on a lecture tour around the city, he fainted and was carted to a San Francisco hospital. As his politics were too radical, the California Federation of Labor refused to raise funds for his medical bills, and he quietly passed away in March 1942, just 3 years out of prison.

***

The real culprit of the Preparedness Day Bombing is lost to time -- but many speculate that the true culprit was Alexander Berkman, a radical who’d been responsible for several prior bombings, had once laid out a plot to “blow up California,” and who’d fled to his home city of New York a day after the parade.

But one thing is certain: it wasn’t Thomas Mooney.

To many, Mooney was a martyr for social justice -- a symbol of “class persecution,” a man who constantly pursued justice. His case -- one of the first in the United States to determine that a verdict resulting from feigned evidence violates due process under the 14th Amendment -- gave other who were wrongly accused hope.

“All I wanted,” he said, just before his death, “was to lift California of its shame.”

This post was written by Zachary Crockett; you can follow him on Twitter here.

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O espaço é um lugar muito frio. A temperatura certa no vácuo e longe de qualquer astro é de cerca de -270 graus C.

Essa temperatura seria suficiente para congelar o hidrogênio na Terra - mas ainda está alguns poucos graus acima do que é considerado o "zero absoluto" - o ponto mais frio possível.

O motivo pelo qual a temperatura ainda se mantém acima deste ponto de zero absoluto é a constante presença de algo chamado radiação cósmica de fundo em micro-ondas, uma energia originada no "Big Bang" e que preenche todo o cosmo.

Por isso, em quase todo o universo, -270 é a temperatura mais baixa possível.

Mas não em todo ele.

A Nebulosa de Bumerangue fica a 5 mil anos-luz da constelação de Centaurus. Lá, uma nuvem de gás está sendo expelida por uma estrela que está morrendo.

Esta nuvem é um dos objetos mais misteriosos do universo. Os astrônomos acreditam que a temperatura cai para algo apenas meio grau acima do zero absoluto. Até onde sabemos, este é o ponto mais frio do universo.

Justamente por isso, muitos astrônomos se debruçam sobre esse tema. Alguns acreditam que ele pode ajudar a explicar várias dúvidas - como sobre a formação de galáxias e explosões cósmicas.

Morte das estrelas, nascimento da vida

A morte de estrelas é um fenômeno comum no universo. Daqui a alguns anos, o nosso Sol também vai esgotar seu combustível nuclear, se esfriar e expandir - ao ponto de absorver Mercúrio, Vênus e talvez até mesmo a Terra.

Após uma série de processos, o Sol vai virar uma anã-branca, diminuindo até atingir aproximadamente o tamanho da Terra.

A morte das estrelas tem um papel fundamental no surgimento da vida. Astrônomos já sabem há bastante tempo que elementos como carbono, oxigênio e ferro são fundidos dentro do núcleo das estrelas. Quando elas morrem, esses elementos são distribuídos pela galáxia.

Essa distribuição de elementos - sobretudo da morte de estrelas muito maiores do que o Sol - é que ajuda a formar rochas, planetas e até mesmo a vida.

Nebulosa especial

O processo acontece em vários lugares do universo. Mas a Nebulosa de Bumerangue é especial. Cientistas estão conseguindo observá-la em fase anterior ao de se tornar uma "nebulosa planetária" - que é um dos estágios da morte das estrelas.

Os astrônomos Raghvendra Sahai, da Nasa, e Lars-Ake Nyman, do telescópio ALMA, no Chile, descobriram que o gás que é liberado pela nebulosa flui a uma velocidade de 164 quilômetros por segundo - dez vezes maior do que o normal observado até hoje - e 4 mil vezes mais rápida que um trem-bala.

Essa velocidade de liberação de energia explica porque a Nebulosa de Bumerangue é tão fria.

A velocidade de liberação é tão alta que fica difícil até mesmo para a radiação cósmica de fundo de microondas conseguir esquentar um pouco o ambiente. Com a exceção de algumas condições criadas especialmente em laboratórios na Terra, não existe nenhum lugar mais frio em todo o universo.

Sahai já havia teorizado sobre essa possibilidade antes mesmo da descoberta empírica. Ao analisar osdados da Bumerangue, ele descobriu que suas previsões feitas há 20 anos estavam se materializando.

"Fiquei todo arrepiado. Foi um dos momentos mais emocionantes da minha carreira", conta.

Mas mesmo observado o fenômeno, os astronomos ainda não sabem explicá-lo.

O que ninguém consegue explicar é o porquê da velocidade extrema de 164 quilômetros por segundo. A estrela dentro da Bumerangue não é brilhante o suficiente para produzir esta quantidade de energia.

Muitos outros mistérios persistem.

Sahai e seus colegas ainda vão realizar novas observações ainda este ano. Em algumas regiões, o gás expelido flui a 35 quilometros por segundo. Os astrônomos querem mapear em detalhes por que o gás flui a velocidades diferentes em pontos distintos.

"Esses objetos não são apenas bonitos. Eles são cheios de segredos", diz Soker.

Leia a versão original desta reportagem em inglês no site BBC Earth.