A Wrinkle in Space Time

A love story.

This is a picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of the farthest star ever detected in the universe. It’s called Earendel. It’s a massive star — twice as hot as our sun. It’s also one million times more luminous. It resides in the Sunrise Arc, an apt name for what may be one of the oldest galaxies in the universe. This is how far away it is: the light captured in this image left the surface of Earendel 12.9 billion years ago. For reference, I’m sure all you nerds know that the light barely peeking through the clouds on this gray day left our Sun about 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. It’s taken me about that long to write this paragraph.

Where space is concerned, scale can be overwhelmingly disorienting. If Thomas Kinkade were to paint cute little stars like these, he’d just choose a special brush, I guess, and make sure they looked extra sparkly. But to understand the enormity of the actual cosmos, astronomers use measurements of light in two ways: distance and time. This not only gives the universe a shape — a way to plot planetary bodies in relation to each other — but by knowing how fast light travels, we also learn how old something is. The geniuses at NASA call this “lookback time.” And by using it, they know that the light from Earendel started its journey to Webb’s NIR-Cam (Near Infrared-Camera) about 900 million years after the Big Bang.  

The collective human intelligence that created the technology that captured this image is astonishing. And for that reason, the cool kids at NASA should be glorified in the highest, hallelujah! They toughed it out in math, getting harassed for their brainy ways while my crew competed for how much we didn’t study for Algebra (that’s the one with the x’s and y’s, right?). My only memory of math is that I didn’t understand any of it, ever. But the cool kids — the ones who became inspired by the poetry of math and science — they somehow bypassed all the earthly bullshit, and went on to invent something as audacious as a telescope that can see into the past. And, just to show how important this particular far-away star is, they gave it a very English major (albeit Tolkien-esque) name. They called it Earendel, which is Old English for “morning star.” Damn they’re good.

By now you know I’m a sucker for nerds. So, you might not be surprised to know that my first crush was Carl Sagan. (Followed very closely by Alan Alda, but I’ll save that for another post.) In the 1980s and 90s, Sagan was my everything. Go on, laugh. But it wasn’t his foxy beige turtleneck, or the bushy hair on his head and face. It was his perspective on our place in the universe. The Pale Blue Dot still makes me swoon. And maybe also his halting and resonant baritone voice — he sounded like he was just rattling these gigantic thoughts off the top of his head. Cosmos rocked my eight year-old world, so much so that I dreamed of becoming an astronomer. It wasn’t to be, of course (see: my high school crew, see also: x and y confusion). But another facet of Sagan’s shining talents inspired me, too. It was his work as a communicator; his writing reached far and wide, and traveled into the future where it still resonates with me. He taught me then what I know now: the work of expressing big ideas is important and necessary. It might not give me tools to build a telescope, but it does give me a way to see through distance and time.

There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. There is very nearly nothing in the dark; except for little bits here and there, often associated with the light, this infinite receptacle is empty. This picture is strangely frightening. It should be familiar. It is our universe.

Carl Sagan

This past week, I had the disorienting experience of looking at another distant galaxy: a chronological display of pictures of my children, which had been scattered across drives and Dropbox folders and all manner of technologically daunting devices. For years, my memories have been warped by the dictates of my dickish iPhone. Somehow it was missing years of life events, making me feel like parts of my memory were slowly draining out of my head. The task of retrieving them was way above my skill set, but my wonderful, Sagan-like nerd of a husband solved multiple cosmic mysteries and assembled them all in one place, where I can now see them in order.

This is the very first photo.

This is my oldest son, Ari, on the day he was born. At this very minute, he’s galavanting 3,000 miles away in California with the love of his life. He’ll soon return to NYC where he’ll graduate from college in a few short months. This Earendel, my morning star — the oldest light in the cosmos that my husband and I created — is a constant reminder of the “lookback time” that NASA scientists are fond of analyzing. But I don’t need a magnifying wrinkle in space time, or a NIR-Cam to see the love that pours well into the future of this little baby. And even though the universe has expanded in my life at least as much as it has since Earendel posed for its photo (by some 28 billion light years), the 21½ years since Ari was born have gone by in an instant. 

There’s something that mothers know that astronomers don’t. Even Carl Sagan. The distance and time that separates planetary bodies — that tells us how far away they are, how old they are, or how much gravity they possess — does not exist where our children are concerned. With each one of them, throughout the universe and over all of time, there is only here. And there is only now.