Because mass warps space, light from behind distant galaxies bends under strong gravity. The product is “lensing” or “gravitational lensing.” Distant galaxies hidden behind closer galaxies can appear as two or even as four mirror images on either side of or surrounding the nearer galaxy or galaxy cluster that exerts the gravitational “bending.” The lensing can also magnify light from distant objects. Now we can see a star called Spock that lies about eight billion light years away and another, even more distant, star called Icarus at nine billion light years’ distance. Understand me. We’re not talking galaxies composed of hundreds of billions of stars, but two individual stars isolated for viewing thanks to lensing by a galaxy cluster four billion light years away. Take a look up at Andromeda, a nearby galaxy, and show me an individual star. Yes, that’s the significance of Spock and Icarus.*
The twinkling stars appear within the smeared and curved images of lensed galaxies. Even though they are large stars, their visibility astonishes astronomers because of their great distance. Who woulda thunk it? Seeing an individual star some 9 billion light years away can astonish almost everyone. That’s nine billion times almost six trillion miles. That’s lots of zeroes: about 5.4 times ten to the twenty-second power.
It is possible, of course, that Spock and Icarus no longer exist, their light happily traveling along the country-curving two-lane road to strike our telescopes and astonish us. Their light left them four to five billion years before Earth was a twinkle in the eyes of the Sun’s nebula. The twinkling of Spock suggests repeated eruptions from its surface, but that’s just the leading hypothesis.
Now think of your deceased ancestors, those long gone before you were a twinkle in your parents’ eyes. Occasionally, you might come across something reaching you from their time. Of course, they left you some physical traits—and maybe some behavioral propensities. Generally, you know them through the intervening lens of their children and grandchildren, or maybe even from farther back in your family history. How much like a fuzzy, indistinguishable smearing of their being like some fuzzy smeared shape of a distant lensed galaxy is their appearance. But imagine that your distant relative is someone like George Washington. Now, regardless of the temporal separation and the bending through the lens of historians, you do have a glimpse of the individual in your background. So, who in your distant history might be your Spock or Icarus, your George Washington? And how much, beyond hypothesis, do you really know about what made them act as you see them through the lens of intervening humans?
And now the future: It’s true that most of us will simply be fuzzed-out in the population of our time as seen through the lens of the ensuing generations. Maybe some of us will, for whatever reason, twinkle through, live long, and appear visible to future generations as an isolated, maybe a bit mysterious human entity. There will always be some lensing of a life as seen by those who follow.
For you my wish paraphrases the Vulcan wish expressed by the character Spock on Star Trek: May you live long and twinkle.
*Selsing, Jonatan, et al., Dark Cosmology Centre. The Most distant single star ever detected. Online at https://dark.nbi.ku.dk/news/2018/the-most-distant-single-star-ever-detected/ also
Kelly, Patrick L, Jose M. Diego and 43 others. Extreme magnification of an individual star at redshift 1.5 by al galaxy-cluster lens. Nature Astronomy, 2, 334-342 (2018), online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0430-3
The twinkling stars appear within the smeared and curved images of lensed galaxies. Even though they are large stars, their visibility astonishes astronomers because of their great distance. Who woulda thunk it? Seeing an individual star some 9 billion light years away can astonish almost everyone. That’s nine billion times almost six trillion miles. That’s lots of zeroes: about 5.4 times ten to the twenty-second power.
It is possible, of course, that Spock and Icarus no longer exist, their light happily traveling along the country-curving two-lane road to strike our telescopes and astonish us. Their light left them four to five billion years before Earth was a twinkle in the eyes of the Sun’s nebula. The twinkling of Spock suggests repeated eruptions from its surface, but that’s just the leading hypothesis.
Now think of your deceased ancestors, those long gone before you were a twinkle in your parents’ eyes. Occasionally, you might come across something reaching you from their time. Of course, they left you some physical traits—and maybe some behavioral propensities. Generally, you know them through the intervening lens of their children and grandchildren, or maybe even from farther back in your family history. How much like a fuzzy, indistinguishable smearing of their being like some fuzzy smeared shape of a distant lensed galaxy is their appearance. But imagine that your distant relative is someone like George Washington. Now, regardless of the temporal separation and the bending through the lens of historians, you do have a glimpse of the individual in your background. So, who in your distant history might be your Spock or Icarus, your George Washington? And how much, beyond hypothesis, do you really know about what made them act as you see them through the lens of intervening humans?
And now the future: It’s true that most of us will simply be fuzzed-out in the population of our time as seen through the lens of the ensuing generations. Maybe some of us will, for whatever reason, twinkle through, live long, and appear visible to future generations as an isolated, maybe a bit mysterious human entity. There will always be some lensing of a life as seen by those who follow.
For you my wish paraphrases the Vulcan wish expressed by the character Spock on Star Trek: May you live long and twinkle.
*Selsing, Jonatan, et al., Dark Cosmology Centre. The Most distant single star ever detected. Online at https://dark.nbi.ku.dk/news/2018/the-most-distant-single-star-ever-detected/ also
Kelly, Patrick L, Jose M. Diego and 43 others. Extreme magnification of an individual star at redshift 1.5 by al galaxy-cluster lens. Nature Astronomy, 2, 334-342 (2018), online at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0430-3
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