May 3, 2021: At the Center of the Universe, From the Middle of Nowhere. (And Anybody Can Go There.)
Nighttime.
Cool.
Clear skies above, bounded by a full circle of woodlands on the ground.
Cuddled by that forest, and beneath a giant metal ear to the sky lay the electronics shack, all part of one big radio. [1] I’d just come inside from looking at the crescent moon through an 8-inch Newtonian telescope 315 years after Newton invented it. The moon’s craters looked like they’d been blown open that instant. With no atmosphere or erosion there, it’s no wonder. Radial ejecta from impacts fanned out like spokes on a wheel. Mountainous walls rimming each basin looked like a naked range on earth. And with the sun at such steep angles, shadows were stark and crisp, cast from the blackest black to the brightest white.
When the moon was formed by a titanic collision some four-and-one-half billion years ago, it was much closer, appearing about 24-times larger in the sky, before it fell away to where it is now. Today, the moon is only a bit over a light second away as it recedes from earth at 1.5-inches per year. Practically speaking, by light speeds, what I saw on the moon happened that moment. But inside the shack, what I saw happened long ago. Actually, I couldn’t see it with my eyes because the message was sent via light my eyes cannot detect: radio waves. Like an echo from desperate times, that signal left its home as here on earth the god Ptah lost his hold on Memphis, cursing Egypt with a second dark age as its Middle Kingdom fell to Hyksos invaders. But the broadcast didn’t come from earth. It came from a place 3600 light years away—and thus 3600 years in the past—in that little-talked-about constellation Camelopardalis between the more talked about Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper. Recall, one lightyear is about 6 trillion miles (10T km). While light travels 186,000 miles per second (3e8 m/s), it still takes a lot of seconds to cross 3600 times 6 trillion miles. [2]
Inside the shack, one of the professors connected the received radio signal to a frequency downconverter, translating it to audio on a speaker. As fast as you can say, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap… is what it sounded like. Just right for the percussion musician Gerard Grisey to use in his Le Noir de l'Etoile, The Black Star. [3] Pulsed every seven-tenths of a second, what I heard was like some kind of code above a disagreeable hiss. But what did it mean and who made it? Was it a warning? A cry for help? Or simply, “Hello universe. Here I am. My name is Pulsar PSR B0329+54,” which, with proper translation, is what it said. [4] Since we on earth just happen to be on the line-of-sight with this pulsar’s strobing poles—from which it blasts the universe with unfathomable power—we get pulsed with its message like a lighthouse.
A pulsar is a leftover shard of a star that blew itself apart as a supernova—an exploding star bigger than the sun. The supernova that created this gyro occurred about the time Ardipithiecus ramidus split off from Ardipithiecus kadabba on what appears our ancestral line, and did so somewhere along the dividing tectonic plates of Africa’s Great Rift Valley 5-million years ago. Fortunately for us, the stellar calamity that created this pulsar was far away or kadabba would not have become ramidus; there’d be no life on earth.
Big stars—like this one used to be—live hard and die young. They burn the midnight oil for several hundred million years, but when enough is enough, they demolish themselves in milliseconds. They’re terribly obese, so when they fall, they fall really hard. So hard, they smash the countless positive-protons and negative-electrons that make up their atoms into neutral neutrons. Like a giant atomic nucleus 10-miles (17 km) across with more mass than our 800,000 mile (1.3M km) diameter sun. Hence another name for pulsar is neutron star. This compression is so dense a single teaspoon weighs a billion tons. And like a skater retracting her arms on the ice for a spin, with a teeny fraction of the radius it once had a neutron star spins at ferocious rates. In the time it takes earth to rotate once on its axis for a single day, PSR B0329+54 whips through 123,000 days, because each day is only seven-tenths of a second long.
As I leaned over the audio speaker, I tried to think of all that took place for me to hear what I heard. Though not far by galactic standards, this inconceivably distant object sears anything nearby with its blowtorch beacon to atomize any planet that might have been there. So much raw power, from my distance a minuscule measure of its greeting could still be heard. From scooping up that signal in the sky with a dish antenna to the rat’s nest of wires and electronics to my ears, it was amazing, but intangible. Who can conceive of a distance of 22e15 miles (36e15 km), or a ten-thousand-trillion-trillion-Watt strobe light? That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Watts… Huh? Or even something as comparatively puny as the five million years since this pulsar was born?
I stood there trying to get my head around it. Gazing at stacks of electronics, it seemed remarkable that humans can even engineer such things to discover microscopic needles in truly cosmic haystacks. And with science, by experts employing reason and the rational workings of a 3-pound brain, we know what they are, when they were born, and how they’ll die.
When I walked back outside, Mister Newton’s invention had been repositioned to gather what he called corpuscles of light, this time from the constellation Coma Berenices. I peered into the eyepiece. From a wee spec of black space emerged a cascade of radiance that got focused—simply by the shape of my gelatinous eye—onto my retina. The retina is a kind of photodiode, converting light that travels well in air to electricity that travels well on optic nerves. From there, that current tunneled through my head and smacked the back of my brain so hard I could feel it. A call went out over the wires to make realizations, memories, and get excited. Right there in front of me was the Coma Cluster, 300 million light years away. The Hubble Telescope assayed it as an empire of over 22,000 galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns. Thanks to the Kepler spacecraft we now know most of them have planets. From this colossal kingdom I could see only a handful of states among the vastness of stellar desert. Hubble’s mirror is a much bigger eye, almost 8-feet in diameter, not an 8-inch Newtonian. But what I saw plugged me in. The spiral arms of Coma’s turbine galaxies were spun up just waiting for someone to close the switch, to make their connection, pumped up with wonder.
Having the Drake equation fresh in my head—a formula to estimate the number of intelligent species in the universe—I stared transfixed. Somewhere among the hundreds of billions of stars I could see was somebody in orbit on a planet looking up at their own empty night. From a wee spec of black in their dark sky was an eyeball looking back.
Mine.
Like those occasions at Notre Dame and a clean room in Pasadena, years in my future, it was “A religious experience without the religion. I felt dizzy. I stood in that spot for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something.” [5] Much further back in time, this communiqué was sent when my locale was on the equator as part of Pangea, that giant supercontinent where even dinosaurs hadn’t yet evolved. And right then, after 300 million years and all that’s happened since—from the rise of humans to discovery of the New World to my parents falling in love—I just happened to catch its message with a stiff punch in the head. In that moment I was staggered to exist; a biological organism comprised of the atoms those stars made and conscious of it, all from a forest in the middle of nowhere.
“Holy shhhhit,” I whispered.
It’s for moments like these that people do things like science and art. All the hours spent, all the solitary study, all the work in search of relations between what seem unrelated things to paint a worldview of connected inspiration. And it’s open to anybody. One needn’t be a scientist or an engineer or an artist to feel that epiphany.
Yes, the grind of American life is one in which for many each day is another lesson in submission. Yet there’s revelations to be had if we can turn away from what we made for what already exists but gets no press. That remarkable machine called chlorophyll in every cell of that plant on your desk; the disappearance of 4 million tons of matter every second inside that sun above your head—matter converted to light to power that chlorophyll; those forty-trillion-trillion hydrogen atoms in your hand, atoms created with the Big Bang that are 13.7 billion years old. And before you want to believe it, they’ll be part of somebody else. It’s all there, waiting to inspire. All one needs is a book, to read about it, ponder it, and plug in.
[1] Part of the NRAO (National Radio Astronomical Observatory) is the North Liberty Radio Observatory, part of the University of Iowa Physics and Astronomy department. More about the Very Long Baseline Array network can be found here .
[2] Sometimes the speed of light does cheat the speed limit. See, Brett Williams, Notre Dame and the Religious Experience in Science, on Goodreads, May 6, 2019.
[3] Gerard Grisey, Le Noir de l'Etoile, YouTube. Grisey opens with 0.7 sec percussion rep rate of Pulsar O329+54.
[4] Wikipedia, Pulsar O329+54.
[5] Williams, ref. 2.
Until next time: Monday, June 7, 2021.
Cool.
Clear skies above, bounded by a full circle of woodlands on the ground.
Cuddled by that forest, and beneath a giant metal ear to the sky lay the electronics shack, all part of one big radio. [1] I’d just come inside from looking at the crescent moon through an 8-inch Newtonian telescope 315 years after Newton invented it. The moon’s craters looked like they’d been blown open that instant. With no atmosphere or erosion there, it’s no wonder. Radial ejecta from impacts fanned out like spokes on a wheel. Mountainous walls rimming each basin looked like a naked range on earth. And with the sun at such steep angles, shadows were stark and crisp, cast from the blackest black to the brightest white.
When the moon was formed by a titanic collision some four-and-one-half billion years ago, it was much closer, appearing about 24-times larger in the sky, before it fell away to where it is now. Today, the moon is only a bit over a light second away as it recedes from earth at 1.5-inches per year. Practically speaking, by light speeds, what I saw on the moon happened that moment. But inside the shack, what I saw happened long ago. Actually, I couldn’t see it with my eyes because the message was sent via light my eyes cannot detect: radio waves. Like an echo from desperate times, that signal left its home as here on earth the god Ptah lost his hold on Memphis, cursing Egypt with a second dark age as its Middle Kingdom fell to Hyksos invaders. But the broadcast didn’t come from earth. It came from a place 3600 light years away—and thus 3600 years in the past—in that little-talked-about constellation Camelopardalis between the more talked about Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper. Recall, one lightyear is about 6 trillion miles (10T km). While light travels 186,000 miles per second (3e8 m/s), it still takes a lot of seconds to cross 3600 times 6 trillion miles. [2]
Inside the shack, one of the professors connected the received radio signal to a frequency downconverter, translating it to audio on a speaker. As fast as you can say, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap… is what it sounded like. Just right for the percussion musician Gerard Grisey to use in his Le Noir de l'Etoile, The Black Star. [3] Pulsed every seven-tenths of a second, what I heard was like some kind of code above a disagreeable hiss. But what did it mean and who made it? Was it a warning? A cry for help? Or simply, “Hello universe. Here I am. My name is Pulsar PSR B0329+54,” which, with proper translation, is what it said. [4] Since we on earth just happen to be on the line-of-sight with this pulsar’s strobing poles—from which it blasts the universe with unfathomable power—we get pulsed with its message like a lighthouse.
A pulsar is a leftover shard of a star that blew itself apart as a supernova—an exploding star bigger than the sun. The supernova that created this gyro occurred about the time Ardipithiecus ramidus split off from Ardipithiecus kadabba on what appears our ancestral line, and did so somewhere along the dividing tectonic plates of Africa’s Great Rift Valley 5-million years ago. Fortunately for us, the stellar calamity that created this pulsar was far away or kadabba would not have become ramidus; there’d be no life on earth.
Big stars—like this one used to be—live hard and die young. They burn the midnight oil for several hundred million years, but when enough is enough, they demolish themselves in milliseconds. They’re terribly obese, so when they fall, they fall really hard. So hard, they smash the countless positive-protons and negative-electrons that make up their atoms into neutral neutrons. Like a giant atomic nucleus 10-miles (17 km) across with more mass than our 800,000 mile (1.3M km) diameter sun. Hence another name for pulsar is neutron star. This compression is so dense a single teaspoon weighs a billion tons. And like a skater retracting her arms on the ice for a spin, with a teeny fraction of the radius it once had a neutron star spins at ferocious rates. In the time it takes earth to rotate once on its axis for a single day, PSR B0329+54 whips through 123,000 days, because each day is only seven-tenths of a second long.
As I leaned over the audio speaker, I tried to think of all that took place for me to hear what I heard. Though not far by galactic standards, this inconceivably distant object sears anything nearby with its blowtorch beacon to atomize any planet that might have been there. So much raw power, from my distance a minuscule measure of its greeting could still be heard. From scooping up that signal in the sky with a dish antenna to the rat’s nest of wires and electronics to my ears, it was amazing, but intangible. Who can conceive of a distance of 22e15 miles (36e15 km), or a ten-thousand-trillion-trillion-Watt strobe light? That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Watts… Huh? Or even something as comparatively puny as the five million years since this pulsar was born?
I stood there trying to get my head around it. Gazing at stacks of electronics, it seemed remarkable that humans can even engineer such things to discover microscopic needles in truly cosmic haystacks. And with science, by experts employing reason and the rational workings of a 3-pound brain, we know what they are, when they were born, and how they’ll die.
When I walked back outside, Mister Newton’s invention had been repositioned to gather what he called corpuscles of light, this time from the constellation Coma Berenices. I peered into the eyepiece. From a wee spec of black space emerged a cascade of radiance that got focused—simply by the shape of my gelatinous eye—onto my retina. The retina is a kind of photodiode, converting light that travels well in air to electricity that travels well on optic nerves. From there, that current tunneled through my head and smacked the back of my brain so hard I could feel it. A call went out over the wires to make realizations, memories, and get excited. Right there in front of me was the Coma Cluster, 300 million light years away. The Hubble Telescope assayed it as an empire of over 22,000 galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns. Thanks to the Kepler spacecraft we now know most of them have planets. From this colossal kingdom I could see only a handful of states among the vastness of stellar desert. Hubble’s mirror is a much bigger eye, almost 8-feet in diameter, not an 8-inch Newtonian. But what I saw plugged me in. The spiral arms of Coma’s turbine galaxies were spun up just waiting for someone to close the switch, to make their connection, pumped up with wonder.
Having the Drake equation fresh in my head—a formula to estimate the number of intelligent species in the universe—I stared transfixed. Somewhere among the hundreds of billions of stars I could see was somebody in orbit on a planet looking up at their own empty night. From a wee spec of black in their dark sky was an eyeball looking back.
Mine.
Like those occasions at Notre Dame and a clean room in Pasadena, years in my future, it was “A religious experience without the religion. I felt dizzy. I stood in that spot for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something.” [5] Much further back in time, this communiqué was sent when my locale was on the equator as part of Pangea, that giant supercontinent where even dinosaurs hadn’t yet evolved. And right then, after 300 million years and all that’s happened since—from the rise of humans to discovery of the New World to my parents falling in love—I just happened to catch its message with a stiff punch in the head. In that moment I was staggered to exist; a biological organism comprised of the atoms those stars made and conscious of it, all from a forest in the middle of nowhere.
“Holy shhhhit,” I whispered.
It’s for moments like these that people do things like science and art. All the hours spent, all the solitary study, all the work in search of relations between what seem unrelated things to paint a worldview of connected inspiration. And it’s open to anybody. One needn’t be a scientist or an engineer or an artist to feel that epiphany.
Yes, the grind of American life is one in which for many each day is another lesson in submission. Yet there’s revelations to be had if we can turn away from what we made for what already exists but gets no press. That remarkable machine called chlorophyll in every cell of that plant on your desk; the disappearance of 4 million tons of matter every second inside that sun above your head—matter converted to light to power that chlorophyll; those forty-trillion-trillion hydrogen atoms in your hand, atoms created with the Big Bang that are 13.7 billion years old. And before you want to believe it, they’ll be part of somebody else. It’s all there, waiting to inspire. All one needs is a book, to read about it, ponder it, and plug in.
[1] Part of the NRAO (National Radio Astronomical Observatory) is the North Liberty Radio Observatory, part of the University of Iowa Physics and Astronomy department. More about the Very Long Baseline Array network can be found here .
[2] Sometimes the speed of light does cheat the speed limit. See, Brett Williams, Notre Dame and the Religious Experience in Science, on Goodreads, May 6, 2019.
[3] Gerard Grisey, Le Noir de l'Etoile, YouTube. Grisey opens with 0.7 sec percussion rep rate of Pulsar O329+54.
[4] Wikipedia, Pulsar O329+54.
[5] Williams, ref. 2.
Until next time: Monday, June 7, 2021.
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