First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Preston, Richard

  Appendix 1:

  Main Characters

  (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)

  Juan Carrasco. Senior night assistant at Palomar Observatory. The man who operates the Hale Telescope for the astronomers. Former barber.

  James E. (Jim) Gunn. American astronomer. The only astronomer who has completely distinguished himself as a theorist, as an observer of things in the sky, and as a builder of instruments.

  Donald (Don) Schneider. American astronomer. Software wizard. Born on a wheat farm in Nebraska. Became an astronomer because he wasn’t any good at farming.

  Maarten Schmidt. Dutch astronomer living in the United States. In 1963, he discovered the true nature of quasars, one of the most important discoveries in the history of astronomy.

  Eugene (Gene) Shoemaker. American astrogeologist. Discovered the first known asteroid-impact craters on the earth. Expert in asteroids and comets that could hit the earth.

  Carolyn Shoemaker. American astronomer, married to Eugene Shoemaker. Top discoverer of comets in history.

  Appendix 2:

  Glossary

  accretion disk. A disk of material rotating in orbit around a massive object such as a planet, a star, or a black hole. The rings around Saturn are an accretion disk. A burning accretion disk is thought to form around a black hole in the center of a quasar, and this disk is thought to be the source of a quasar’s light.

  asteroid. Small body of rock or metal in orbit around the sun. A type of minor planet.

  Balmer series of hydrogen spectral lines. A regular series of sharply defined colors emitted by heated hydrogen gas. When Maarten Schmidt saw these colors in a quasar, in 1963, they told him that quasars are violent, energetic objects located a vast distance from the earth.

  black hole. A place where matter has collapsed upon itself and punched a hole in spacetime, out of which no light can escape. Time in a black hole dies or comes to an end.

  Cassegrain cage, or Cass cage. A room that hangs from the bottom of the Hale Telescope, under the mirror, containing equipment.

  Cassegrain focus. A focal point in a reflecting telescope located just below the center of the main mirror (i.e., the primary mirror) at the bottom of the telescope. CCD. Charge-coupled device. An electronic silicon light-sensing chip used in place of photographic film in a camera. Extremely sensitive to light.

  comet. Small body of ice or icy rock in orbit around the sun. Near the sun, the comet’s ice evaporates, creating a tail of gases streaming away from the nucleus of the comet. When comets go extinct (lose their tails) they may be indistinguishable from asteroids.

  dark matter, or missing mass. The main constituent of the universe. No one knows what it is.

  dark time. The moonless time of the month.

  data room. Small room beside the telescope where astronomers work.

  decomposition of light. The making of a spectrum of light by passing the light through a prism or other apparatus, thereby smearing the light apart into its constituent colors (wavelengths or energies).

  earth-crossing asteroid. An asteroid or extinct comet traveling on an orbit that intersects the orbit of the earth and is therefore liable to hit the earth.

  first light. A technical term from astronomy signifying the moment when starlight is allowed to fall on a new mirror for the first time. Also used metaphorically in this book to mean (1) seeing something for the first time, and (2) the earliest light emitted from objects when the universe was young.

  4-shooter. Electronic camera somewhat larger than a refrigerator, designed and built by James Gunn with a team of instrument builders, some of whom are known as the Wizards of the Wastebasket. The camera is installed at the bottom of the Hale Telescope.

  galaxy. A vast cloud of stars, gas, dust, and unknown material. Contains up to several trillion stars. Comes in a variety of shapes.

  guide star. A bright star used as a reference point for guiding a telescope while the telescope is tracking the sky (which moves overhead, due to the rotation of the earth).

  horseshoe bearing. A C-shaped steel bearing, wet with oil, used to support a telescope as it swings around. The horseshoe bearing on the Hale Telescope is the largest bearing of any kind in the world, measuring forty-six feet across.

  impact structure. A large eroded or buried impact crater on the earth. Can be more than a hundred miles across.

  light. Electromagnetic radiation composed of photons, or packets of energy, which manifests itself as both waves and particles. Includes radio waves, infrared light, visible light, ultraviolet light, X rays, and gamma rays—all are forms of light.

  lookback time. The amount of time it takes for light from an object to reach the earth. Looking farther outward into the sky is equivalent to looking backward in time, since the farther one sees outward, the more ancient the image one sees.

  Lyman alpha spectral line. A sharply defined peak of colored light coming from hot hydrogen gas such as that found in a quasar.

  Main Asteroid Belt. A zone of asteroids orbiting the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

  minor planet. An asteroid or a comet.

  night assistant. Professional telescope operator. Never an astronomer.

  Oreo, Staple of the nocturnal diet of Palomar astronomers.

  paddle. A remote-control device with buttons on it, which an astronomer holds in her hands and uses to control the fine motions of a telescope.

  Palomar Glue (slang). Transparent tape reinforced with threads of fabric. “Palomar Glue is what holds this place [Palomar Observatory] together”—James Gunn.

  primary mirror. The main mirror in a reflecting telescope, located at the bottom of the telescope tube.

  prime focus. A focal point of a reflecting telescope, located near the mouth of the telescope.

  prime focus cage. A small chamber at the mouth of the Hale Telescope where an observer can sit, looking down onto the main mirror, and where light-gathering instruments may be installed.

  Prime Focus Club. A small, mysterious club of unidentified astronomers who claim to have made love with someone while in the prime focus cage of the Hale Telescope.

  quasar. A pointlike source of brilliant light of all colors. Quasars are very distant, primeval objects, deep in lookback time, near the limit of the visible universe. The word quasar comes from “quasi-stellar object.” Thought to be a hot, burning core of a galaxy which contains a black hole at its center.

  redshift. Reddening, or lengthening, of light waves emitted by an object that is receding from earth. Used as a gauge of relative distance to an object in the sky. The higher the redshift, the farther away the object is.

  reflecting telescope. A telescope that uses a mirror to gather light.

  Schmidt telescope. A telescope design invented by Bernhard Schmidt. It has a corrector plate made of thin transparent glass, placed at the front of the telescope like a circular window. This plate bends the rays of incoming light in such a way as to give the telescope a wide field of view while making it very efficient at gathering light.

  seeing, the. A precise measure of turbulence in the atmosphere. The better the seeing, the better a telescope on earth can form a pointlike image of a star.

  slew. To move a telescope very quickly across the sky.

  spectrum. An image or plot showing light from an object broken into its constituent colors (or wavelengths or energies). See also decomposition of light.

  structure up there. Thin, transparent clouds veiling the sky. Bad news for astronomers.

  Trojan asteroid. A minor planet that travels in Jupiter’s orbit, named after a hero from the Trojan war. There are two clouds of Trojan asteroids, one cloud traveling sixty degrees ahead of Jupiter in Jupiter’s orbit (the Greeks), the other traveling sixty degrees behind Jupiter in Jupiter’s orbit (the Trojans).

  Credits

  The list is long, but many people deserve mention. First of all, the support, enthusiasm, and sensitive editorial judgment of Morgan Entrekin made this book a reality. I am a
lso indebted to Sallie Gouverneur for her wisdom and for her faith in me.

  A number of members of my family provided a most effective combination of moral support and cash for this book when it was in its proto-nebular phase: my parents, Dorothy and Jerome Preston, Jr.; my grandparents, Iva and Jerome Preston, Sr.; my grandmother, Mrs. Richard H. McCann; and my aunt and uncle, Anna McCann Taggart and Robert D. Taggart. For their moral support, thanks to my two brothers: David G. Preston, M.D., who is the only real scientist in this family, and Douglas J. Preston, who is a writer and whose books are an inspiration to me. I also wish to thank my wife, Michelle Parham Preston, for her insightful reading of many parts of my manuscript, not to mention her ability to listen patiently to enough stories about quasars and asteroids to have caused any other wife to consult privately with a lawyer against that day when her husband loses his mind.

  For their friendship and encouragement, many thanks to John and Yolanda McPhee, Bonnie Hunter, Bill Howarth, Lewis and Ellen Goble, and Helen and Robert Alexander.

  My particular thanks to Prof. John Thorstensen, of Dartmouth College, for his thoughtful reading of many parts of the manuscript for scientific accuracy, and for often helping me to find the right words. Any errors of scientific fact in this book, however, are entirely my own folly.

  I owe a debt of scholarship to two historians of science: Spencer Weart, of the American Institute of Physics, and David DeVorkin, of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Dr. Weart and Dr. DeVorkin have built up and nurtured fine collections of oral-history interviews with astronomers, physicists, and space scientists, among which Dr. Weart’s interview with Maarten Schmidt and Dr. DeVorkin’s interview with James Westphal were especially interesting and useful to me.

  I owe a debt of another kind to the late Wilbury A. Crockett, a retired teacher of English from Wellesley High School, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, I was not one of Mr. Crockett’s better students, but he somehow managed to instill in us his respect for words. And many thanks to Robert Chambers, of Pomona College, for taking his astronomy class on a field trip to see the Hale Telescope. That was my first meeting with the Big Eye.

  Also many thanks to Harry Evans of Random House, for making this new edition of First Light possible, and to my remarkable editor at Random House, Sharon DeLano. And thanks to Charlie Conrad at Anchor Books for his enthusiasm and help.

  A large number of people gave interviews and supplied background material and expertise for this book. Many, many thanks to:

  Horace Babcock

  William A. Baum

  Morley Blouke, Tektronix,

  Inc.

  Eileen Boller

  Edward Bowell

  Robert Brucato

  Bobby Bus

  George Carlson

  Michael Carr and family

  Lily Carrasco

  G. Edward Danielson

  Edwin W. Dennison

  Wilfried Eckstein

  Earle Emery

  Gene Fair, Fair Optical Co.

  Jesse L. Greenstein

  Fred Harris

  Eleanor F. Helin

  Byron Hill

  John Hoessel

  James R. Janesick

  Melvin W. Johnson

  Paula Kempchinsky and Patrick

  Shoemaker

  Gillian Knapp

  Helen Knudsen

  Luz and Alicia Lara

  Tod Lauer

  David J. Levy

  Ernie Lorenz

  Mrs. Okla McKee,

  Historical Archives and

  Museum of the Catholic

  Diocese of El Paso, Texas

  Brian G. Marsden

  Jim Merritt, explorer

  Gerry Neugebauer

  The night assistants of Palomar

  Observatory:

  Jean Mueller

  Jeff Phinney

  Skip Staples

  J. Beverley Oke

  Jeremiah Ostriker

  Bohdan Paczýnski

  Georg Pauls

  Bruce H. Rule

  Fred and Linda Salazar

  Paul Schechter

  James Schombert

  Mark Serrurier

  Lyman Spitzer

  John Strong

  David Tennant

  Robert Thicksten

  Edwin L. Turner

  Arthur H. Vaughan

  Ludmilla Wightman

  The Wizards of the Wastebasket:

  Jovanni Chang

  Richard Lucinio

  Victor Nenow

  J. DeVere Smith

  James A. Westphal

  Barbara A. Zimmerman

  Finally, for all of his help, I wish to thank Larry Blakée. When he was twelve years old, he saw the two-hundred-inch mirror being polished in the Caltech optical shop, something he never forgot. When he grew up, he became the first electronics technician for the Hale Telescope—he devoted his working life to that mirror and to all of the things that surround it.

  For

  Michelle Parham Preston,

  my guide star

  BY RICHARD PRESTON

  First Light

  American Steel

  The Hot Zone

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Richard Preston is the author of The Hot Zone (about lethal viruses) and American Steel (about the Nucor Corporation’s project to build a revolutionary steel mill). He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and has won numerous awards, including the AAAS-Westinghouse Award and the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT. First Light won the American Institute of Physics award in science writing. An asteroid has been named “Preston” in honor of First Light. Preston is a lump of rock the size of lower Manhattan. It is likely to some day collide with Mars or the earth.