Sunday, November 20, 2011
The edge of the world - from above
One of my students, Monica He, posted this incredible link on her blog to this time-lapse video of Earth from above from the International Space Station. You can see the Northern lights, city lights, and lightning storms. Wow!
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Seeing the Unseen
We are colorblind. Sure, many of us can see red and green, blue, yellow, orange and purple. Black, gray and white and brown (which are mixes of those other colors). But the extent of our vision ends there. A whole rainbow of colors, incomprehensibly vast, exists beyond the limits of our vision. When we feel the sun's warmth on our skin, we're absorbing infrared light. And the purpler-than-purple, so-purple-we-can't-see-it light that gives us sunburns is ultraviolet light. Although we see infrared light and ultraviolet light with the skin on our arms and our faces, not with our eyes, it is still fundamentally the same as optical light. Optical light is the name astronomers use for the light we see with our eyes - red through green through purple, the clay and the grass and the mountains.
So what determines what light we can see and what light we can feel and what light just rushes right past us? It's a property called the wavelength. If you've ever been to the ocean, then you've seen a wavelength. When I go in the ocean with my dad to go boogie boarding, I watch the wave that's closest, about to hit me. But I've also got my eye on the next wave after that, in case that's a big wave, a better ride. The distance between the two waves (maybe 30 feet) is the wavelength. Like the ocean, light washes over us in tiny little waves.
Our bodies react in different ways to different wavelengths. Our eyes are sensitive to wavelengths from 400 to 700 nanometers. Take a human hair and split it into one thousand thin strands, and each of those is the size of a wavelength of light that we can see. Infrared light is about twice the wavelength of the light we can see, and UV light is about half. Stretch the light waves out by two, putting the crests of the waves twice as far apart, and suddenly, instead of seeing it with our eyeballs we feel it on our skin. Scrunch the light together by a factor of two, so the crests are twice as close together, then instead of seeing it with our eyeballs we don't notice it at all until suddenly we have a sunburn (or worse, skin cancer).
There is light even beyond infrared and ultraviolet. That is just a small, small part of the many kinds of light out there. Radio waves, which we use to listen to NPR or POP-FM, these radio waves are light too. They're very very very stretched out light. The waves picked up by our radios are 10 feet long. So we're going from one one-thousandth of the width of a human hair to two humans tall. But they are both light.
If we go in the other direction, to very very short, we can get to gamma rays. Gamma rays have the shortest wavelength and the most energy, and they come from the strongest most powerful creatures in the Universe - violent explosions and exotic beasts like black holes. Gamma rays have a wavelength that is even smaller than the size of an individual atom. Because gamma rays are so so small, they just sneak right on through everything. This makes them very hard to detect. We definitely can't see, or feel, them with our bodies.
Astronomy is the cure for colorblindness. Using telescopes - optical telescopes and infrared telescopes (like night-vision goggles!) and ultraviolet telescopes and X-ray detectors and gamma-ray detectors and radio telescopes, we can "see" all the different wavelengths. We can look at the sky through new eyes, eyes that can see what people 100 years ago never dreamed we would see.
Take a look at the pictures here. These pictures are pictures of the Milky Way galaxy, where we live. The visible-light image (center row on the right) shows the familiar band of stars stretching across the sky that you can see when you go camping up in the mountains or out in the desert, in a very dark place. These other pictures show our same galaxy, from the same point of view, just with different "eyes" (telescopes) that see in different wavelengths. Relying on the ingenuity of engineers and scientists and inventors who built us those eyes, we can see the unseen universe.
So what determines what light we can see and what light we can feel and what light just rushes right past us? It's a property called the wavelength. If you've ever been to the ocean, then you've seen a wavelength. When I go in the ocean with my dad to go boogie boarding, I watch the wave that's closest, about to hit me. But I've also got my eye on the next wave after that, in case that's a big wave, a better ride. The distance between the two waves (maybe 30 feet) is the wavelength. Like the ocean, light washes over us in tiny little waves.
Our bodies react in different ways to different wavelengths. Our eyes are sensitive to wavelengths from 400 to 700 nanometers. Take a human hair and split it into one thousand thin strands, and each of those is the size of a wavelength of light that we can see. Infrared light is about twice the wavelength of the light we can see, and UV light is about half. Stretch the light waves out by two, putting the crests of the waves twice as far apart, and suddenly, instead of seeing it with our eyeballs we feel it on our skin. Scrunch the light together by a factor of two, so the crests are twice as close together, then instead of seeing it with our eyeballs we don't notice it at all until suddenly we have a sunburn (or worse, skin cancer).
There is light even beyond infrared and ultraviolet. That is just a small, small part of the many kinds of light out there. Radio waves, which we use to listen to NPR or POP-FM, these radio waves are light too. They're very very very stretched out light. The waves picked up by our radios are 10 feet long. So we're going from one one-thousandth of the width of a human hair to two humans tall. But they are both light.
If we go in the other direction, to very very short, we can get to gamma rays. Gamma rays have the shortest wavelength and the most energy, and they come from the strongest most powerful creatures in the Universe - violent explosions and exotic beasts like black holes. Gamma rays have a wavelength that is even smaller than the size of an individual atom. Because gamma rays are so so small, they just sneak right on through everything. This makes them very hard to detect. We definitely can't see, or feel, them with our bodies.
Astronomy is the cure for colorblindness. Using telescopes - optical telescopes and infrared telescopes (like night-vision goggles!) and ultraviolet telescopes and X-ray detectors and gamma-ray detectors and radio telescopes, we can "see" all the different wavelengths. We can look at the sky through new eyes, eyes that can see what people 100 years ago never dreamed we would see.
Take a look at the pictures here. These pictures are pictures of the Milky Way galaxy, where we live. The visible-light image (center row on the right) shows the familiar band of stars stretching across the sky that you can see when you go camping up in the mountains or out in the desert, in a very dark place. These other pictures show our same galaxy, from the same point of view, just with different "eyes" (telescopes) that see in different wavelengths. Relying on the ingenuity of engineers and scientists and inventors who built us those eyes, we can see the unseen universe.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Transcript for Podcast
Oops! I may have gotten my podcast delayed by a few days... turns out they wanted it by 5 pm today and I found that out when I checked my email at 5:15. Well, I'll record it and send it in by 7 pm tonight (that's when Chinese class starts). I spent some time asking Laura, another grad student who also studies space dust, about where dust comes from and how it turns into planets. I need to correct what I already wrote a little bit for accuracy, and then add a bit on the end to tell the whole story. Not getting to anomalous emission as I intended, but I think this is enough of a story for 5-10 minutes.
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Stars are the dragons of the Universe. Their massive fiery bellies boil with an inconceivable heat. This heat comes from nuclear reactions. When we set off a nuclear bomb on Earth (which is a very unfortunate and unnatural process), we create for just a tiny moment and in a tiny space the high temperatures needed to fuse together four hydrogen atoms and make helium. By comparison, this process of fusion chugs along constantly, and completely naturally, in the belly of the Sun for 10 billion years! Imagine 10 billion years of continuous nuclear bombs... how strong that is!
Our Sun is a fairly small dragon. She sleeps curled up in the center of the solar system, digesting her meal of hydrogen atoms. Since she is so small, once she finishes turning her hydrogen in helium, the temperatures in her belly won't be hot enough to turn helium into heavier elements like carbon. But there are lots of bigger, hotter stars lurking out there in the galaxy. When those stars finish burning hydrogen into helium, their hunger is not satisfied, and they digest helium into carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. The biggest stars even go on to make metals, like silicon and iron.
Eventually, a star reaches a point where it can no longer digest the heavy elements in its belly. This is when our sleeping dragon wakes up. Realizing that she has a hot lump of rock in her stomach, she roars in pain, vomiting flames into the sky. Small stars just shed their outer layers of gas like an old snakeskin and then settle down and crystallize into a giant diamond. These unbelievable stellar remnants are known as "white dwarf stars."
The larger stars bring themselves to a much more violent end. When they have digested their initial supply of hydrogen all the way into iron, and find an undigestable lump of rock in their belly, they explode. Our dragon goes supernova: she falls in on herself, violently spewing flames in all directions as she collapses into a neutron star or a black hole. These flames contain a very precious treasure: the elements produced in the dragon's belly over the course of her lifetime. As the dragon dies, part of her hoard of treasure is recycled back into the Universe.
After the Big Bang, we pretty much had only three elements: hydrogen, helium, and a tiny tiny amount of lithium. That's element #1, element #2, and element #3. But think about what our earth is made of, what humans are made of. Our earth involves a ton of metals. We have an iron core. Our bodies involve lots of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. Our oceans consist of H20 - hydrogen and oxygen. Where do we get carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and iron and everything else we need for our own existence? The answer is the stars. Without the elements produced in the bellies of the stars, we could not exist.
How do the elements ejected by dying stars end up in us? Stars don't spit out pre-packaged Earths. Imagine the directions on the package: "Just add water, will re-hydrate within 3-5 minutes." Instead, the stars spit out hot, hot gas, full of metals. As the gas cools, the atoms combine to form molecules, and then the molecules combine to form dust grains. The fiery breath leaves the dragon's scaly lips and then it cools, turns to ash and drifts away through space.
This space dust is not the same dust we see floating in a shaft of sunlight in our living room and coating our old VHS collection. This is not couch fluff or human skin or cracker crumbs. Instead, these dust grains are little nuggets of metal, transporting the elements we need for life. One common kind of dust grain is made out of carbon, in a form known as graphite, just like the tips of our pencils. Another common type of dust grain is made with silicon atoms - the same element we need for the microchips in our computers. Little pencil tips and little microchips, so small they're invisible, floating through space.
How do these dust grains turn into us? When you get a lot of gas and dust in one place, its gravity can become strong enough that the cloud of dust and gas collapses under its own weight. When this happens, you normally end up with a flat disk of dust and gas, like a dinner plate. The center of the dinner plate will become a star, eating up most of the dust and gas from the disk. The leftovers become the planets, and eventually become us. In the disk of gas and dust, there are so many dust grains, and they're all very excited, running every which way. With all these confused and excited dust grains running around, they end up running into each other. And sometimes - not all the time, but sometimes - when they run into each other, they stick. Imagine if two people ran into each other in a busy airport - SMACK! - and then they were stuck for life. Then they run into someone else, and stick to that third person. And maybe another ball of stuck people is forming on the other side of the airport. Eventually you get enough big balls of people that the balls of people start running into each other, and sticking. You get bigger and bigger balls until everyone in the airport - the flight attendants, the TSA security guards, the guy running the Barnes and Noble stand, the tourists in Hawaiian shirts - everyone is stuck in one big ball. That's how a planet forms. All the crazy little dust grains run around and get stuck to each other until they become bigger dust grains, then rocks, then mini-planets, and finally Earth.
So take a moment right now to look at the back of your hand. Pinch yourself. The skin you are holding between your fingers, the fine little hairs on that skin, the red blood cells coursing through the veins, all of those are made of star dust.
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Stars are the dragons of the Universe. Their massive fiery bellies boil with an inconceivable heat. This heat comes from nuclear reactions. When we set off a nuclear bomb on Earth (which is a very unfortunate and unnatural process), we create for just a tiny moment and in a tiny space the high temperatures needed to fuse together four hydrogen atoms and make helium. By comparison, this process of fusion chugs along constantly, and completely naturally, in the belly of the Sun for 10 billion years! Imagine 10 billion years of continuous nuclear bombs... how strong that is!
Our Sun is a fairly small dragon. She sleeps curled up in the center of the solar system, digesting her meal of hydrogen atoms. Since she is so small, once she finishes turning her hydrogen in helium, the temperatures in her belly won't be hot enough to turn helium into heavier elements like carbon. But there are lots of bigger, hotter stars lurking out there in the galaxy. When those stars finish burning hydrogen into helium, their hunger is not satisfied, and they digest helium into carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. The biggest stars even go on to make metals, like silicon and iron.
Eventually, a star reaches a point where it can no longer digest the heavy elements in its belly. This is when our sleeping dragon wakes up. Realizing that she has a hot lump of rock in her stomach, she roars in pain, vomiting flames into the sky. Small stars just shed their outer layers of gas like an old snakeskin and then settle down and crystallize into a giant diamond. These unbelievable stellar remnants are known as "white dwarf stars."
The larger stars bring themselves to a much more violent end. When they have digested their initial supply of hydrogen all the way into iron, and find an undigestable lump of rock in their belly, they explode. Our dragon goes supernova: she falls in on herself, violently spewing flames in all directions as she collapses into a neutron star or a black hole. These flames contain a very precious treasure: the elements produced in the dragon's belly over the course of her lifetime. As the dragon dies, part of her hoard of treasure is recycled back into the Universe.
After the Big Bang, we pretty much had only three elements: hydrogen, helium, and a tiny tiny amount of lithium. That's element #1, element #2, and element #3. But think about what our earth is made of, what humans are made of. Our earth involves a ton of metals. We have an iron core. Our bodies involve lots of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. Our oceans consist of H20 - hydrogen and oxygen. Where do we get carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and iron and everything else we need for our own existence? The answer is the stars. Without the elements produced in the bellies of the stars, we could not exist.
How do the elements ejected by dying stars end up in us? Stars don't spit out pre-packaged Earths. Imagine the directions on the package: "Just add water, will re-hydrate within 3-5 minutes." Instead, the stars spit out hot, hot gas, full of metals. As the gas cools, the atoms combine to form molecules, and then the molecules combine to form dust grains. The fiery breath leaves the dragon's scaly lips and then it cools, turns to ash and drifts away through space.
This space dust is not the same dust we see floating in a shaft of sunlight in our living room and coating our old VHS collection. This is not couch fluff or human skin or cracker crumbs. Instead, these dust grains are little nuggets of metal, transporting the elements we need for life. One common kind of dust grain is made out of carbon, in a form known as graphite, just like the tips of our pencils. Another common type of dust grain is made with silicon atoms - the same element we need for the microchips in our computers. Little pencil tips and little microchips, so small they're invisible, floating through space.
How do these dust grains turn into us? When you get a lot of gas and dust in one place, its gravity can become strong enough that the cloud of dust and gas collapses under its own weight. When this happens, you normally end up with a flat disk of dust and gas, like a dinner plate. The center of the dinner plate will become a star, eating up most of the dust and gas from the disk. The leftovers become the planets, and eventually become us. In the disk of gas and dust, there are so many dust grains, and they're all very excited, running every which way. With all these confused and excited dust grains running around, they end up running into each other. And sometimes - not all the time, but sometimes - when they run into each other, they stick. Imagine if two people ran into each other in a busy airport - SMACK! - and then they were stuck for life. Then they run into someone else, and stick to that third person. And maybe another ball of stuck people is forming on the other side of the airport. Eventually you get enough big balls of people that the balls of people start running into each other, and sticking. You get bigger and bigger balls until everyone in the airport - the flight attendants, the TSA security guards, the guy running the Barnes and Noble stand, the tourists in Hawaiian shirts - everyone is stuck in one big ball. That's how a planet forms. All the crazy little dust grains run around and get stuck to each other until they become bigger dust grains, then rocks, then mini-planets, and finally Earth.
So take a moment right now to look at the back of your hand. Pinch yourself. The skin you are holding between your fingers, the fine little hairs on that skin, the red blood cells coursing through the veins, all of those are made of star dust.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Space Dust - Pencil Tips and Microchips
Over a month ago, I signed myself up to do a podcast for 365 Days of Astronomy. My podcast will be up on their web site this Thursday. A month and a half seemed like a good long time to record a 5-10 minute talk about some subject in astronomy. Suddenly, it's half a week and that doesn't seem so long. I decided to talk about dust (my research) because it is a really cool topic in astronomy that is broadly neglected. Even astronomers often seem to just consider dust a nuisance. I decided to free-write about space dust in my blog, and hopefully it'll give me ideas about what to put in the podcast.
Stars are the dragons of the Universe. Their massive fiery bellies boil with an inconceivable heat. When we set off a nuclear hydrogen bomb on Earth (a very unfortunate and unnatural process), we create for just a tiny moment and in a tiny space the high temperatures needed to fuse together four hydrogen atoms and make helium. By comparison, this process of fusion chugs along constantly, and completely naturally, in the belly of the Sun for 10 billion years! Imagine 10 billion years of continuous nuclear bombs... how strong that is!
Our Sun is a fairly small dragon. She sleeps curled up in the center of the solar system, digesting her meal of hydrogen atoms. Since she is so small, once she finishes turning her hydrogen in helium, the temperatures in her belly won't be hot enough to turn helium into heavier elements like carbon. But there are lots of bigger, hotter stars lurking out there in the galaxy. When those stars finish burning hydrogen into helium, their hunger is not satisfied, and they digest helium into carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. The biggest stars even go on to make metallic elements like silicon and iron.
Eventually, a star reaches a point where it can no longer digest the heavy elements in its belly. This is when our sleeping dragon wakes up. Realizing that she has a hot lump of rock in her stomach, she roars in pain, vomiting flames into the sky. Small stars just shed their outer layers of hot gas like an old snakeskin and then settle down and crystallize into a giant diamond. These unbelievable stellar remnants are known as "white dwarf stars."
The larger stars bring themselves to a much more violent end. When they have digested their initial supply of hydrogen all the way into iron, and find an undigestable lump of rock in their belly, they explode. Our dragon goes supernova: she falls in on herself, violently spewing flames in all directions as she collapses into a neutron star or a black hole. These flames contain a very precious treasure: the elements produced in the dragon's belly over the course of her lifetime. As the dragon dies, part of her hoard of treasure is recycled back into the Universe.
After the Big Bang, we pretty much had only three elements: hydrogen, helium, and a tiny tiny amount of lithium. That's element #1, element #2, and element #3. But think about what our earth is made of, what humans are made of. Our earth involves a ton of metals (a molten iron core). Our bodies involve lots of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. Our oceans consist of H20 - hydrogen and oxygen. Where do we get carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and iron and everything else we need for our own existence? The answer is the stars. Without the elements produced in the bellies of the stars, we could not exist.
How do the elements ejected by dying stars end up in us? Stars don't spit out pre-packaged Earths. "Just add water, will re-hydrate within 3-5 minutes." Instead, they spit out hot, hot gas, full of metals. As the gas cools, the atoms combine to form molecules, and then the molecules combine to form dust grains. The fiery breath leaves the dragon's scaly lips and then it cools, turns to ash and drifts away through space.
This space dust is not the same dust we see floating in a shaft of sunlight in our living room and coating our old VHS collection. This is not couch fluff or human skin or cracker crumbs. Instead, these dust grains are little nuggets of metal, transporting the elements we need for life. One common kind of dust grain is made out of carbon, in a form known as graphite, just like the tips of our pencils. Another common type of dust grain is made with silicon atoms - the same element we need for the microchips in our computers. Little pencil tips and little microchips, so small they're invisible, floating through space.
Okay, that's enough for now. I read it out loud and that took about 6 minutes. I need to do some fact checking and then add a bit more info about dust, since I barely got to the subject of dust. I think it's okay if my podcast mostly doesn't end up being about dust. I wonder if it's too metaphorical? Nah, I like metaphors :) I tend to think in analogies, a fact that fellow grad student Sirio finds hilarious. When he imitates me talking about electromagnetism (the force that holds together the electrons and the protons in an atom), he says "Mr. Proton and Mr. Electron meet up and shake hands." I kinda like that analogy so I decided to keep it.
Stars are the dragons of the Universe. Their massive fiery bellies boil with an inconceivable heat. When we set off a nuclear hydrogen bomb on Earth (a very unfortunate and unnatural process), we create for just a tiny moment and in a tiny space the high temperatures needed to fuse together four hydrogen atoms and make helium. By comparison, this process of fusion chugs along constantly, and completely naturally, in the belly of the Sun for 10 billion years! Imagine 10 billion years of continuous nuclear bombs... how strong that is!
Our Sun is a fairly small dragon. She sleeps curled up in the center of the solar system, digesting her meal of hydrogen atoms. Since she is so small, once she finishes turning her hydrogen in helium, the temperatures in her belly won't be hot enough to turn helium into heavier elements like carbon. But there are lots of bigger, hotter stars lurking out there in the galaxy. When those stars finish burning hydrogen into helium, their hunger is not satisfied, and they digest helium into carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. The biggest stars even go on to make metallic elements like silicon and iron.
Eventually, a star reaches a point where it can no longer digest the heavy elements in its belly. This is when our sleeping dragon wakes up. Realizing that she has a hot lump of rock in her stomach, she roars in pain, vomiting flames into the sky. Small stars just shed their outer layers of hot gas like an old snakeskin and then settle down and crystallize into a giant diamond. These unbelievable stellar remnants are known as "white dwarf stars."
The larger stars bring themselves to a much more violent end. When they have digested their initial supply of hydrogen all the way into iron, and find an undigestable lump of rock in their belly, they explode. Our dragon goes supernova: she falls in on herself, violently spewing flames in all directions as she collapses into a neutron star or a black hole. These flames contain a very precious treasure: the elements produced in the dragon's belly over the course of her lifetime. As the dragon dies, part of her hoard of treasure is recycled back into the Universe.
After the Big Bang, we pretty much had only three elements: hydrogen, helium, and a tiny tiny amount of lithium. That's element #1, element #2, and element #3. But think about what our earth is made of, what humans are made of. Our earth involves a ton of metals (a molten iron core). Our bodies involve lots of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. Our oceans consist of H20 - hydrogen and oxygen. Where do we get carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and iron and everything else we need for our own existence? The answer is the stars. Without the elements produced in the bellies of the stars, we could not exist.
How do the elements ejected by dying stars end up in us? Stars don't spit out pre-packaged Earths. "Just add water, will re-hydrate within 3-5 minutes." Instead, they spit out hot, hot gas, full of metals. As the gas cools, the atoms combine to form molecules, and then the molecules combine to form dust grains. The fiery breath leaves the dragon's scaly lips and then it cools, turns to ash and drifts away through space.
This space dust is not the same dust we see floating in a shaft of sunlight in our living room and coating our old VHS collection. This is not couch fluff or human skin or cracker crumbs. Instead, these dust grains are little nuggets of metal, transporting the elements we need for life. One common kind of dust grain is made out of carbon, in a form known as graphite, just like the tips of our pencils. Another common type of dust grain is made with silicon atoms - the same element we need for the microchips in our computers. Little pencil tips and little microchips, so small they're invisible, floating through space.
Okay, that's enough for now. I read it out loud and that took about 6 minutes. I need to do some fact checking and then add a bit more info about dust, since I barely got to the subject of dust. I think it's okay if my podcast mostly doesn't end up being about dust. I wonder if it's too metaphorical? Nah, I like metaphors :) I tend to think in analogies, a fact that fellow grad student Sirio finds hilarious. When he imitates me talking about electromagnetism (the force that holds together the electrons and the protons in an atom), he says "Mr. Proton and Mr. Electron meet up and shake hands." I kinda like that analogy so I decided to keep it.
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Image Credit
The background image on my blog is from the Hubble telescope, thanks to NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency). The first time I saw an image of a galaxy like this I stared at it for minutes. I have to admit I also teared up a little. Another one of those moments where I felt like I could just step off the edge of the world, and walk into the universe.
Falling up
This summer, I went to a summer school. Summer school is astronomy summer camp for grad students. For a week, I camped in the White Mountains in eastern California and spent my days with 20 other grad students from around the world learning about radio interferometry. Radio interferometry means using multiple radio dishes to make pictures of the sky at radio frequencies. Objects in outer space are radiating light that has the same frequencies as the signals we use to transmit our radio, TV, cell phones, and GPS. Fortunately for the entertainment industry, the signals from objects in outer space are very faint so we don't need to worry about Ugly Betty being interrupted by a radio-emitting galaxy passing overhead. This is not as fortunate for scientists. To detect the faint signals from outer space, we put our telescopes up in the mountains where we don't have to look through as much atmosphere. This is why CARMA (the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy), where I went to the summer school, is at an elevation of 7000 feet.
I'm including a couple pictures of the array that I took during the summer school. My fellow grad student Sirio and I have an ongoing argument about which is more beautiful: radio telescopes (like the ones in the pictures) or optical telescopes (like Keck or Palomar). I'm captivated by the beauty of radio telescopes and the way the whole array turns and sweeps across the sky in uniform. Monks hidden in the mountains, raising their arms and eyes to the sky in a slow, unending dance. They remind me of whirling dervishes.
On my last night at the CARMA summer school, I slept out under the stars. At the campsite, no lights bled their orange glow into the horizon, no smog smothered the stars. Lying back on my sleeping bag, I saw so many stars. Here in Pasadena, it's easy to count the stars. There, I wouldn't even know where to start. The Milky Way stretched across the sky in an uninterrupted band. For a moment I knew that if I took a step forward, I would step off the edge of the world, and fall up into the stars.
I'm including a couple pictures of the array that I took during the summer school. My fellow grad student Sirio and I have an ongoing argument about which is more beautiful: radio telescopes (like the ones in the pictures) or optical telescopes (like Keck or Palomar). I'm captivated by the beauty of radio telescopes and the way the whole array turns and sweeps across the sky in uniform. Monks hidden in the mountains, raising their arms and eyes to the sky in a slow, unending dance. They remind me of whirling dervishes.
On my last night at the CARMA summer school, I slept out under the stars. At the campsite, no lights bled their orange glow into the horizon, no smog smothered the stars. Lying back on my sleeping bag, I saw so many stars. Here in Pasadena, it's easy to count the stars. There, I wouldn't even know where to start. The Milky Way stretched across the sky in an uninterrupted band. For a moment I knew that if I took a step forward, I would step off the edge of the world, and fall up into the stars.
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