Awe and Wonder
If any science can lay claim to having been the first, it must surely be astronomy. As far back in human history as we know, people have looked at the nighttime sky and wondered what was out there. Only recently have they--we--begun to get the answers right, but it is still the case that in astronomy, as in most other sciences, our ability to gather facts is keener than our ability to put them together. Just when scientists think that they understand something, new observations yield new data that don’t fit.
As it was for prehistoric people, astronomy remains a source of wonder to this day. Astronomers meeting in Pasadena this week disclosed that they observed what appears to have been the birth of a galaxy 12 billion years ago--the first time that any galaxy has been seen aborning. If their analysis of faint light and radio waves is correct, the finding will force cosmologists to go back and revise their notions of how the universe was formed.
Current thinking on the matter has proceeded on the premise that all of the galaxies in the universe, including our own Milky Way, formed at roughly the same time as billions of stars condensed from the hot gases and electrically charged plasmas that filled the cosmos. The “new” galaxy is three-quarters of the way to the edge of the universe, and is very different from familiar galaxies closer to us. Its existence would indicate that the process of galaxy creation continued for billions of years after astronomers thought that it stopped.
The observation of this distant galaxy sending out extraordinarily weak signals is a scientific tour de force that would have been impossible even two years ago. The technique by which the observation was made is the latest example of the symbiotic relationship between science and technology. New instruments allow scientists to gather new knowledge. The telescope enabled Galileo to determine the structure of the solar system, and modern radio astronomy combined with new extremely sensitive light detectors made possible this latest observation.
Where will it all end? Will astronomers ever be satisfied that they have the explanation for the universe that people have sought for thousands of years? We don’t expect to see it, but the findings of astronomy demonstrate over and over that the hunt is at least as exciting as the quarry.
