“All light is late,” wrote the poet Li-Young Lee, reminding me how long it takes for starlight to reach my eyes. When I look at the stars, I may be seeing late light from some whose funerals took place a long, long time ago. Stars are light-years away; galaxies are millions of times that far away. Chet Raymo, who is to astronomy what Li-Young Lee is to poetry, tells me that if I could find Quasar 3C 273 in my backyard telescope, I would be looking at a point of light that started heading my way more than one and a half billion years ago.5 Compared to that, the sun is a newborn. Hundreds of
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