First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Richard Preston

An hour later, the telephone rang in the data room. It was Jim Gunn’s wife, Jill Knapp, calling from New Jersey. She is a radio astronomer.

  “Hello, love,” Jim said, and after a pause, “We’re getting light, anyway.”

  Maarten Schmidt laughed, and to the others he said, “It’s like Galileo all over again. First you have to get light down the tube.”

  Jim and Jill talked quietly. She asked him how he was feeling. He said he felt all right. She asked him if he was getting any sleep. Of course not, he said. Jill Knapp, who is Scottish, once described the frantic hours before an observing run this way: “There is a feeling amongst us astronomers that time on a telescope is extremely precious. One feels the privilege. What a peculiar idea it is for a species to be looking at those …” She paused, seeking a word. “At those things out there.”

  The team settled into more tinkering. Jim Gunn kept sending Don Schneider on errands up to the telescope, to flip the switch on the kludge one way or the other. Meanwhile Barbara Zimmerman finished writing her jazz program and left for Pasadena—she had done all she could. Examining a few white blobs on the television screen—stars—Gunn said, “Let’s get this pig focused.” The night had grown slightly colder, shrinking the Hale Telescope by one-half a millimeter, throwing the stars out of focus. Hitting switches, Juan Carrasco said, “You have the focus.” Juan handed a box with buttons on it—a control paddle—to Don. Don tweaked buttons on the paddle, which moved the secondary mirror at the top of the Big Eye by a few hundredths of an inch, and a motor pinged, echoing in the dome. They tested different focuses.

  “Ten north,” Jim said to Juan.

  “Ready,” answered the night assistant.

  “Ten north again.”

  “Ready here.”

  “Twenty north.”

  “You have it.”

  The stars on the screen eventually grew sharp. “Delicious!” Juan said.

  “Focus disabled?” Don asked Juan.

  “Focus off,” Juan said.

  Jim Gunn turned to Maarten Schmidt. He said, “The telescope is yours.”

  “What are we going to do?” cried Maarten.

  “We can try a transit.”

  “Really!” Maarten turned to Juan. “Let’s shut down the pumps, lights, everything.”

  Juan said, “Pumps off.” The oil pumps shut down, the dome became silent, and the telescope settled and locked onto its bearings. “Lights off,” Juan said. The dome went black inside.

  “Tracking off?” asked Maarten.

  “That is correct,” said Juan.

  “Somebody has to hit the switch on Jim’s box,” Don reminded the others. Juan ran out of the data room, followed by Maarten. Juan rolled the stepstairs under the telescope, and Maarten loped up the ladder into the cage, his flashlight bobbing. Overhead stretched a hanging cloth of stars—the dome slit, open to the north. Maarten flipped the toggle switch on the kludge to “scan.” He climbed down; Juan rolled the stairs away. In the data room, Jim Gunn punched a computer key and the video screen went dark. A moment later it filled with galaxies. The galaxies were streaming upward across the screen.

  “Whoo!” said Schmidt, breathing hard, slapping a pencil against his palm.

  “What are we seeing there?” Don Schneider yelled.

  “There’s a galaxy,” Juan said.

  “Look at that star truck by,” Don said.

  “James! By God!” Maarten said. “Wow! Look at that! Aw, fantastic! We are doing it!”

  Gunn smiled. It was a small Gunn grin.

  They watched the sky move past for a while, and then they decided to shut down the system. It had been a test. “You can stop the sky now,” Schmidt said.

  Gunn hit a key and the galaxies stopped moving.

  “I felt a little jerk,” Maarten said, and everyone laughed. He added, “You wouldn’t believe the environmental impact statements we had to file to get the sky to do that.”

  The astronomers decided to try it again. Gunn hit a key, and galaxies began climbing upward across the video screen. A look of disbelief spread over Gunn’s face. He could not believe that the kludge was working.

  The apparent motion of the night sky, caused by the earth’s rotation, rapidly drew objects up the screen, because Hale Telescope’s field of view covers only a tiny piece of sky. The video monitor displayed the sky’s motion as if the sky were moving from the bottom of the screen to the top: a cloud of galaxies would erupt at the bottom of the screen. In a short while the galaxies would reach the top and disappear one by one, like small bubbles floating up a glass of beer. A computer downstairs was receiving the view and writing it onto spinning tapes.

  “How serious is this exercise?” Maarten wondered. Too bad he asked—the screen went blank. 4-shooter had bombed again. Gunn and Schneider pounded keys, while Schmidt paced the room and whistled. Half an hour later, 4-shooter came back to life, and galaxies again floated up the screen. The telescope was looking north, into rotating sky just below the bowl of the Big Dipper. Faint galaxies spattered the screen—usually twenty or thirty galaxies at once—puffs of lint, pinwheels, pearls, eggs, coins. Some galaxies were close and large, but most appeared tiny, resembling bits of confectioner’s sugar sprinkled on black velvet. Occasionally a foreground star inside the Milky Way would splash a brilliant, lingering track on the screen as it passed. The view gave a palpable sense of depth to the sky. A big telescope pointed in any direction except into the plane of the Milky Way sees many more galaxies than foreground stars. If you took a hamburger bun and picked one of those little black seeds off it—a poppy seed—and you held the seed out at arm’s length, it would just cover the Hale Telescope’s field of view when using 4-shooter. In certain areas of the sky that small, 4-shooter had taken snapshots that held as many as two thousand galaxies. This suggests that the sky is largely unexplored. The universe is rather well explored (by human astronomers) out to a distance of about two hundred million light-years from the Milky Way. Farther out, things become vague, while the edge of the knowable universe has been charted with somewhat less conviction than that of the monk who drew the Americas as a little island west of Greenland.

  A pair of wretched galaxies with twisted arms passed. They appeared to be puffed up and ensnared in each other, throwing away tendrils of stars.

  “Gaw!” said Maarten. “Ejecting galaxies.”

  A while later, a line crossed the screen.

  “What was that?” asked Juan Carrasco.

  “Somebody flew by,” said Don Schneider.

  “It was a meteor,” said Jim Gunn.

  The Principal Investigator pulled out a pocket calculator. He examined the width of the line and the angle at which the line had traversed the screen. He said that this was not a meteor. He punched some buttons on the calculator. He said that the thing appeared to be a fat, blurry object on a low orbit that passed near the poles of the earth, which would make it a military satellite, probably a spy satellite.

  Don remarked that somebody must be watching. He dug up a bag of Chips Ahoy! cookies and passed them around. He settled into a chair with a fistful of cookies, for a night of television. “Man,” he said, munching a cookie, “this is pretty good stuff.” There were several viewing screens in the data room, including a main screen, which was a video box that sat on a table. All four of 4-shooter’s cameras were gathering strips of sky, but the screens showed an identical view, a scene from one of the four strips.

  Maarten tapped the main video screen with a pencil. He said, “That’s a galaxy, that’s a galaxy, that’s a galaxy, that’s a star. These objects are mostly galaxies.” Some of the fainter objects, he said, would be giant elliptical galaxies near the limits of the Hale Telescope’s ability to collect light. They were fossil images—their light had started toward the Milky Way more than five billion years ago, before the earth had condensed. The telephone rang. Maarten picked it up. “Big Eye,” he said. “O, hallo.” It was his wife, Corrie, calling. They chatted quietly in Dutch. He said, “Ja
?… Dat het gaat regenen? O.” He turned to the other astronomers. “She says there’s a pressure area forming in the Pacific. We should be all right for another day or two, then we could get some rain.”

  Jim Gunn took off his glasses and knuckled his eyes and then stared at the screen in silence. As far as Gunn was concerned, he would have to be taken out of the dome in an ambulance before he would give up a night of watching galaxies. Every hour or so, Don Schneider went downstairs and removed a tapeful of sky from the computer. Over time, a cardboard box in the data room filled with tapes.

  Juan Carrasco watched galaxies slide up a video monitor in his control panel. He leaned over to speak to the Principal Investigator. He said, “You have a good night on your hands, Maarten.”

  Maarten grinned.

  Don turned to Juan. “Do you like these kinds of nights, Juan?”

  “Oh, yes. Nothing to do but look.”

  “The days are worse than the nights,” Don said. “You should have been here this afternoon, Juan. Haven’t you noticed my receding hairline?” He pulled a fistful of hair back from his forehead, and Juan laughed. “These have been days of infamy,” Don added. Something caught his attention on the video screen. “Here’s an unhappy galaxy,” he said.

  Maarten took off his glasses and squinted at it. “Ja. It’s strange-looking, Don, I agree.”

  “It’s giving birth.”

  “Ha! To a quasar!”

  Later a shotgun-blast of galaxies crossed the screen. “Whoa,” Don said. “A big, rangy cluster. Some of these rich clusters have a thousand galaxies in them.”

  “This movie really should be in color,” said Maarten.

  “Uh-uh, black and white,” Don said. “I’m a conservative. Look at that one, Maarten. That’s a poor excuse for a galaxy.”

  “It really is. And what is this object?” Maarten said, pointing to a pair of hazy dots.

  “I suspect that’s a galaxy with a friend,” Don said. The telephone rang again. Don kicked the floor with a pair of black sneakers, and his chair rolled backward across the room to the telephone. “Big Eye,” he said into the receiver. “Hello, John! Yes! We are transiting! I know. I know—I was skeptical, I would be the first to admit it.”

  Schmidt tapped the television screen with his cookie. A huge crowd of galaxies had appeared. He leaned over to speak to the night assistant. He said, “Now there you go, Juan. Three big ovals—a spiral; three more ovals—an irregular.” More galaxies appeared. “Look here, we’re not done yet!”

  Juan pointed to a galaxy. “There’s a very strange spiral, Maarten.”

  “Ja, a barred spiral. Nice.” Maarten stood up and walked around the data room for a while. Suddenly he wheeled toward the screen and pointed at two disk galaxies locked in an embrace. “Ho! These are in collision!”

  “Can you hear these people?” Don raised his voice into the telephone. “We have two interacting galaxies going by.” 4-shooter had imaged a pair of galaxies in flagrante delicto, spinning through each other and spraying off stars. The ecstasy would last for a hundred million years. Don finished his conversation, and then the astronomers watched in silence, until perhaps the thought of these fields of galaxies buried in lookback time drew the conversation to time travel. Don said to Maarten, “Did you ever see that Star Trek, the one where Captain Kirk ends up back in New York in the 1930s?”

  “Oh, is that the gangster one?” said Maarten. “I love that gangster one!”

  “No, you’re thinking of ‘A Piece of the Action.’ Where Kirk and Spock land on this planet full of Chicago gangsters.”

  “Right!” Maarten said. “Spock in a gangster suit!”

  “Yes, they called him Spacco,” Don said. “But actually, the one I was thinking of is ‘The City on the Edge of Forever.’ Where they have to investigate this time disturbance. And Kirk runs through this doughnut.”

  “Ah—do I remember that one?” Maarten wondered.

  “And Kirk ends up in New York during the Depression,” Don said. “With this fantastic woman—”

  “Yes!” Maarten said.

  “Joan Collins!”

  “Right!”

  “Kirk falls in love with her, and who wouldn’t. But it turns out she’s the leader of a pacifist movement and that she is going to prevent the United States from entering World War II. Then Kirk finds out that she is going to be hit by a car. He could save her, but he has to let her die.”

  Jim Gunn leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  Later Don Schneider said, “I think we need music for this movie.”

  The night assistant agreed. Juan Carrasco crossed the room and turned on the stereo. Instead of music, he got the news: “The price of gold jumped thirty-five dollars an ounce today, in hectic trading.”

  The announcer moved on to the local headlines. Apparently reading from hot copy, he continued: “A San Diego man was indicted today on charges of—oh. Uh—sexual things.”

  The astronomers were startled. “Juan! What is that?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  Juan turned the dial to KFAC Los Angeles, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons came up, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. “Spring” added a touch of grace to the galaxies streaming past, as the violins called to each other like birds. The screen filled with blotty things, a snow flurry. Suddenly at least two hundred galaxies spattered the screen. The core of an unnamed, unknown supercluster of galaxies was coasting through the Hale Telescope’s field of view.

  George Ellery Hale was a solar astronomer who invented clever machines for studying the sun. He also had a talent for extracting money from tycoons, which he applied to the creation of telescopes. He had a powerful imagination. It overpowered not only him but also everyone around him; and as he talked and wrote of bigger telescopes, he drew businessmen, politicians, and scientists into his precognitions of giant glass. First came the forty-inch Yerkes Telescope, at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, finished in 1897—a refracting telescope that uses lenses to gather light. A Chicago industrialist and expert stock-waterer named Charles Yerkes paid for it. In its day it was the largest telescope on earth. The next of Hale’s telescopes was the sixty-inch reflecting telescope, finished in 1908, which is on the summit of Mount Wilson, overlooking the city of Pasadena. Hale’s father paid for the mirror, while Andrew Carnegie paid for the rest of the telescope. For a time it was the largest on earth. The third was the one-hundred-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, also once the largest on earth and mostly paid for by a Los Angeles hardware king named John Hooker. Hale became the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, located on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena.

  Hale paid for his telescopes with broken nerves. He suffered from a New England family background, a culture in which nervous and physical diseases can no more be separated from one another than a photon can be separated into a wave or a particle. Hale radiated a boyish energy through oval spectacles, and ladies found him charming. He used to jog up Mount Wilson along miles of steep switchbacks, reciting Italian poetry. When in the grip of his overheated imagination, Hale had a peculiar habit of holding his hands rigidly outward from the middle of his body and gazing into the distance. He had a slight body that seemed always in motion, except when it was confined to bed, which was often. He suffered from violent headaches, physical prostration, frantic excitement, insomnia, ringing ears, tingling feet, indigestion, and a general sense that his mind was whirling out of control. Later in life he gave this galaxy of symptoms different names. He called it the “Americanitis,” because he felt that Americans had a tendency to let the wings of their ambition drive them to insanity. Or he called it “the whirligus.” One night, when Hale was forty-two years old, he was sitting up in his bedroom enduring the whirligus when a little man materialized before him. That was the first appearance of the elf. The elf gave Hale some advice on how to run his life. Hale appreciated the advice and thanked the elf, and the elf went away. When (in succeeding months) the elf started coming back, Hale began to worry. Hale would
hear a ringing in his ears, heralding the arrival of the elf, who would materialize and deliver some advice. Hale was naturally reluctant to tell his family and friends about the elf, even when the elf began to follow Hale around during the day. At night Hale would walk in circles around his bedroom under the spell of malignant dreams, during which, according to one of his friends, “in his tormented half-sleep [he] would try to climb the picture frames on the wall.” The elf may have urged Hale to seek psychiatric help. In any event, every now and then Hale would buy a train ticket to the East Coast and check into a sanatorium in Maine, where he would stay for a few months. There he would saw and split a few dozen tons of wood in order to calm himself. He bought a three-wheeled motorcycle. Riding on it through Pasadena one day, he noticed two men on motorcycles. He shouted at them, “Want to race?” and gunned his motorcycle. Then he heard the sirens—he had failed to notice that they were policemen. He tried to give the cops the whirligus, but they arrested him, the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1922, Hale’s nerves became so bad that his doctors feared he was heading for a major nervous breakdown. They persuaded him to take a trip abroad for his health. He chose to go to Egypt.

  With his wife and children, he sailed up the Nile in a lateen-rigged yacht, to the Valley of the Tombs near Luxor, where Howard Carter was just then opening the tomb of Tutankhamen. Hale visited the excavation and watched while the archaeologists pulled a procession of golden treasures from the underground rooms. Tutankhamen had been the son of the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who had attempted to establish the worship of the sun god, Aten, throughout Egypt. Hale’s biographer, Helen Wright, in her book Explorer of the Universe, said she believed that the sight of King Tut’s tomb may have produced effects in Hale opposite from what Hale’s doctors had hoped when they had urged him to travel. Death, eternity, and the Nilotic sun festered in Hale’s brain, until all he could do was sit in a shady corner of his yacht and stare across the river at yellow cliffs, which to Hale seemed “pierced with the doorways of rifled tombs,” as he wrote in a letter. Hale’s resignation as director of the Mount Wilson Observatory soon followed.