The Earth As a Crescent Moon

This spectacular image of our home planet was captured today by an instrument on the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet chaser as the spacecraft approached Earth for its third and final swingby. There's no place like home.

Superman's Eyes

Imagine your eyes could register light across the electromagnetic spectrum—discerning not just visible rays but infrared and x-ray as well. That’s what NASA has done, releasing a composite image of the Milky Way’s turbulent center that combines three distinct views gleaned from its great observatories currently circling the Earth: the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope. This was done to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo first turning his small telescope to the heavens in 1609. Galileo would be pleased.

What is seen in this stunning picture is the chaotic environment surrounding the galaxy’s core (marked in white, center-right), where a supermassive black hole nearly four million times more massive than our Sun resides. Permeating the region is a diffuse blue haze of x-ray light from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees. This is generated by outflows from the supermassive black hole, as well as by winds from massive stars and by stellar explosions in the region. The infrared light, depicted in red, reveals where newborn stars are just beginning to emerge from their dark and dusty cocoons. The yellow represents the Hubble telescope’s near-infrared observations, revealing hundreds of thousands of stars and glowing clouds of gas.

The width of the entire image covers about half a degree on the sky (in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius), about the same angular width as the full moon.

Visualizing Hubble

I was just introduced today to an intriguing website called Many Eyes, run by IBM. You can check it out at http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes. Or just type "many eyes" into a search engine to get there.

One of the site's many features is giving you the ability to turn text into an image. I downloaded the preface to my latest book The Day We Found the Universe, for example, and chose to display it as a "wordle," which shows how frequently words appear in your text by the size of each word. You can even tweak these word "clouds" with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Here's how mine came out:

It's fascinating how well the central themes of my book just pop out, as if by magic. Edwin Hubble would certainly have liked the outcome.

Cosmic Matters

A month ago astronomers announced that the amino acid glycine was detected in a comet. The discovery was made while analyzing samples brought back to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft, which flew through Comet Wild 2 in 2004.

My immediate reaction upon reading this news in the paper was, “How far we have come!” For most of history, astronomers could not be sure that the stuff of the heavens was the same as the stuff on Earth. And they figured an answer would be forever out of their reach. That is, until 150 years ago when Gustav Kirchhoff (left in picture), a professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, and chemist Robert Bunsen (on the right), creator of the famous laboratory burner, showed us how to identify substances by the specific colors of light they emitted during chemical reactions or when burning. And since light knows no distance in space, electromagnetic waves can be effectively studied whether the light originates from a distance of one foot within a laboratory or from one million light-years away.

Kirchhoff eventually turned his attention to the heavens and with his spectroscope identified a number of elements in the Sun’s atmosphere, including sodium, iron, calcium, magnesium, chromium, barium, copper, zinc, and nickel. Here was definitive proof that the chemistry of the Earth was indeed identical to the chemistry of space. Within a few years, other astronomers reported finding similar elements in the stars. The long-standing Aristotelian belief that cosmic matters differed from the terrrestrial elements was finally abolished.

A century later, astronomers became even more ambitious. In 1955 physicist Charles Townes, who would go on to win a Nobel prize for his invention of the maser, gave a talk suggesting that celestial elements were likely linking up and forming actual molecules out in space. Among his candidates were carbon monoxide (CO, the stuff of car exhaust), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), and the hydroxyl radical OH, the oxygen-hydrogen combination that distinguishes all alcohols. But most astronomers at the time were convinced that such molecules were quickly destroyed and hence too rare to seek out.

Fortunately a few MIT radio astronomers didn’t heed those warnings and looked anyway. In 1963 they found OH screaming out at 1,667 megahertz in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. A few years later, Townes himself, along with colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, recorded the radio cries of ammonia and water from space. A race quickly ensued to snare the next new molecules. By 1973 nearly thirty cosmic molecules were identified; by the end of the 20th century, the total was more than a hundred—from ethyl alcohol and hydrogen cyanide to methane, formaldehyde, and nitrous oxide (or laughing gas).

And now the list includes an amino acid, one of the vital building blocks for life. The foundations for life on Earth may have been laid down before our planet even formed nearly five billion years ago.

Galaxies and Nebulae and Clusters, Oh My!

After being rejuvenated from its space shuttle servicing mission last May, the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope is officially back in business. Engineers had spent the last three months focusing, testing, and calibrating. But now it’s back to photographing the universe like never before. Yesterday, NASA released the first stunning snapshots from the upgraded scope. They include a remarkable butterfly-shaped nebula (top left), a galaxy cluster as crowded as a subway in rush hour (bottom left), and a roiling stellar nursery (bottom right). Full details can be obtained by going to http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0910.html.

As a nod to astronomer Edwin Hubble, I wish they had photographed NGC 2261 again as well, a comet-shaped cloud of gas located in the direction of the Monoceros constellation (left). While working on his doctoral thesis at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin around 1914, Hubble took a picture of this nebula and compared it with photographs taken earlier at other observatories. He noticed that his recent photo displayed distinct differences from previous ones, which proved that certain faint nebulae could change over time. It was his first major discovery. Today, this object, located within the Milky Way, is known as Hubble’s variable, a reflection nebula made of gas and fine dust fanning out from the star R Monocerotis. It's about one light-year across and lies about 2,500 light-years away.

NGC 2261 always held a fond place in Hubble’s heart. Soon after he arrived at the Mount Wilson Observatory as a staff astronomer in 1919, he got his first crack at the newly opened 100-inch telescope, what he called his “magic mirror.” It was on Christmas Eve, and he couldn’t have asked for a more fitting holiday present. The atmosphere was almost at its best, and it was also dark-sky time, the Moon having just set in the west. His best photograph of the night came when he aimed the giant scope at his variable nebula. From that point on, it became his observational “mascot.”

Later in his observing life, 1949, Hubble had the honor of being the first scheduled observer on the giant 200-inch Hale Telescope situated on California’s Palomar mountain. Needless to say, he got started by imaging his good luck charm, NGC 2261. Perhaps, Hubble Space Telescope astronomers should consider adopting this intriguing nebula as their mascot, too. Who knows, the luck might rub off. (Though from the look of these photos, maybe they don't need it.)

Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Do We Appreciate

An interesting event happened last May, but I only recently learned of it, thanks to Michael Long, a trustee of the Mount Wilson Institute. When the space shuttle Atlantis went into space last May to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, it took along a very special memento: a century-old basketball that Edwin Hubble used in 1909 while a star player for the University of Chicago. Hubble and his fellow Maroons scored a winning 18-12 victory over Indiana University with the ball. Astronaut John Grunsfeld, also a Chicago alumnus (a PhD in 1988) made the arrangements to take it on the flight with him. On his two previous space telescope missions, Grunsfeld flew with the eyepiece of a telescope that Hubble had peered through at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin and the cover of Hubble's doctoral dissertation.



Hubble, Class of 1910, had been awarded a scholarship to attend the university partly due to his superb athletic skills. He participated in track (though seldom winning) but did far better in basketball, as his exceptional height for the day, six feet two inches, gave him an advantage playing center. He and his teammates were national champions in 1909. They swept through the Big Ten season and won the national title by defeating the University of Pennsylvania in two games.

Above image: Hubble's winning 1909 basketball aboard the space shuttle Atlantis last May (John Grunsfeld)

My Regards to the Squashes

When I give talks about my latest book, The Day We Found the Universe, I'm often asked, "What is your favorite story from the book?" The answer is easy for me: the squashes.

While doing research for the book two years ago at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, I eagerly read all the correspondence between Percival Lowell, the observatory's Boston Brahmin founder, and his top assistant Vesto Slipher (the astronomer who would later be the first to discover galaxies moving outward). Lowell, often traveling on business during the early 1900s, remained in close contact with Slipher about all kinds of matters. From afar, Lowell offered his advice on matters astronomical (“Don’t observe sun much. It hurts lenses.”), administrative (“Permit nobody whatever in observatory office…”), and personal (“Will you kindly see if shredded wheat biscuit are to be got at Haychaff.”).

But I laughed out loud in the library (fortunately, only I and the archivist Antoinette Beiser were there at the time) when I came across a wonderful series of letters regarding the observatory's garden. I told Antoinette then and there that I was determined to include the story in my book. Here's how it turned out:

Lowell doted on his observatory garden and insisted on news of its condition whenever he was away. “How fare the squashes?” asked Lowell one year as fall harvest approached. His letter the following week closed with, “My regards to the squashes.” And finally, “You may when the squashes ripen send me one by express.”

Slipher did not respond. “Why haven’t I received squashes. Express at once if possible,” Lowell anxiously telegraphed right after Christmas. Slipher reluctantly had to answer that the poor gourds, alas, had shriveled up and died.

All was forgiven, though, by next spring [1902]. “Thank you for taking so much pains with the garden! Just keep on planting and you will get something,” wrote Lowell. Slipher did; by July he was sending Lowell his latest bounty. “Your vegetables came all right and delighted me hugely,” replied Lowell. More were sent in October.

As with his gardening, Slipher made progress on the spectrograph as well, eventually becoming a virtuoso at its operation....

Above images: (top) Percival Lowell and (bottom) Vesto Slipher (Lowell Observatory Archives)

Hi-Ho, Hubble, Away!

After being interviewed recently on a national radio program, I was surprised and thrilled to be contacted by a not-so-distant relative of Edwin Hubble.

Vickie Kalthoff of Chesterfield, Missouri, e-mailed that her grandfather, Ralph James, and Hubble’s mother Virginia were first cousins (both distant relations to the famous outlaw Jesse James). In fact, Vickie's brother was born in the same house that Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri, a town that celebrates its most famous resident with a replica of the Hubble Space Telescope on the courthouse grounds. She recalls the superb nighttime sky there in the 1940s and 1950s: “I would stand outside at night, and I felt as if I were floating in the Milky Way.”


Vickie’s grandfather once drove from Kansas to California just to meet the great astronomer, and she wondered what Hubble thought about her “cowboy” gramps. I thought about that, too. While a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in his youth, Hubble completely reinvented himself. He adopted a British accent that he maintained the rest of his life, dressed like a dandy, and could often be arrogant and standoffish to his fellow astronomers. He married into a rich Los Angeles family and throughout his life seemed intent on erasing his Midwestern roots.

In fact, Hubble rarely saw his mother and siblings, who remained in the Midwest. But Vickie told of one particular visit. Her mother and aunts were present when Hubble returned to the family ranch and got on a horse backwards. “They never forgot that,” says Vickie, “but I am sure he was teasing them.”

Above image: Replica of the Hubble Space Telescope on the courthouse grounds of Marshfield, Missouri. (Credit: freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com)

You're Not the Center of the Universe, You Know

My Op-Ed published in the Washington Post, July 19, 2009

Walk into an open field on a clear, moonless night. Overhead, sparkling stars sprinkle the sky. All of them seem equidistant from you―and no one else―and you are lulled into imagining yourself at the center of the universe.

For nearly 500 years, astronomers have struggled to break that illusion. Our petty standing in the cosmos is a scientific fact, if not a visceral experience. Earth zips at nearly 67,000 miles an hour around the sun, which in turn completes one lap around the Milky Way every 220 million years, meaning that the last time we were in this neck of the galaxy, dinosaurs were getting ready to rule the planet. Still, as you look skyward in that pitch-black field, Earth seems to be at the heart of all creation.

We could blame Aristotle. So authoritative was his pronouncement of an Earth-centered universe in the 4th century B.C. that few challenged the idea for nearly two millennia. Over time, the urge to better explain the universe's behavior gave rise to new models. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus boldly placed the sun at the center of the universe, shoving the Earth into motion. The radiant sun was at last in its proper perch, "as if resting on a kingly throne," he wrote.

Copernicus was not disturbed at all by a moving Earth but was troubled by a rotating sky. The Polish mathematician and astronomer, though, knew quite well the consequences of challenging conventional notions. In the preface to his great work, "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres," he predicted that "as soon as certain people learn that in these books of mine . . . I attribute certain motions to the terrestrial globe, they will immediately shout to have me and my opinion hooted off the stage."

That fate fell upon Galileo, who starting in 1609 gathered the crucial evidence supporting Copernicus's heliocentric vision. In 1633 he was brought before the Inquisition and eventually put under house arrest for daring to oppose an Earth relaxing at the universe's center.

By the time of Newton, decades later, such hostility had faded. For one, Sir Isaac's physics could at last explain why we aren't thrown off the planet as the Earth rotates and orbits the sun. But even though Copernicus moved Earth from the hub of the solar system, its inhabitants remained confident that they retained a privileged place at the center of the Milky Way, the sole galaxy. Homo sapiens is an egotistical species; we resist being kicked out of a prime spot in the cosmic scheme of things.

That confidence, though, withered as astronomy underwent a spectacular transformation starting in the 19th century, an era teeming with technological innovation. Prominent industrialists, enriched by the Gilded Age, provided the money that allowed dreamers to construct the powerful telescopes they had long desired.

With one of those new instruments atop California's Mount Wilson, Harlow Shapley resized the Milky Way. He discovered in 1918 that it was 10 times larger than previously thought and, along the way, he relocated the sun and its planets into the galaxy's suburbs. The sun resides roughly 30,000 light-years from the galactic center, more than halfway to the Milky Way's edge. "The solar system is off center, and consequently, man is too," Shapley liked to say.

But Shapley did not take the next step; he, too, fell victim to cosmic pride. Despite the growing evidence that the Milky Way was not alone in the universe, he held fast to his beloved Big Galaxy model: Our galaxy remained at center stage. We lived in a solitary, star-filled oasis suspended in a darkness of unknown depth.

Shapley's vision was demolished in 1924, when Edwin Hubble proved that the cosmos is populated with myriad galaxies as far as the telescopic eye can see. The Milky Way suddenly became a bit player in a much larger drama.

The history of astronomy is a continuing extension of the Copernican principle, moving us farther and farther from the front row. It's a principle of irrelevance that involves not only our position in space and time but also the contents of the universe. In recent decades, astronomers have learned that a hidden ocean of cosmic matter―comprising about 85 percent of the universe's mass―surrounds us, possibly elementary particles yet to be discovered. The stuff of stars, planets and us is but the flotsam in this enveloping sea.

More startling―and taking the Copernican principle to its finale―our universe may not be the only one. As physicists attempt to construct a theory that unifies all the forces of nature, one theme repeatedly arises: that additional cosmic realms may be lurking in other dimensions. We could be part of the multiverse; the Big Bang might have occurred when universes outside our dimensional borders bumped into one another.

The main response to this astounding theory has been to bury our heads in terra firma. Yet such a wider perspective offers some succor, allowing our earthly concerns to shed away. Hubble knew this. During a visit to the astronomer's home, the English poet Edith Sitwell was shown slides depicting the many galaxies that cannot be seen with the naked eye. "How terrifying!" she exclaimed. To which Hubble replied: "Only at first―when you are not used to them. Afterwards, they give one comfort. For then you know that there is nothing to worry about―nothing at all."

Granted, the hugeness of the cosmos is difficult to perceive and, as Sitwell expressed, horrifying to ponder. A character in Thomas Hardy's 19th century novel "Two on a Tower" gives splendid voice to this apprehension: "There is a size at which dignity begins; further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; . . . further on, a size at which ghastliness begins," says astronomer Swithin St. Cleeve. "That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe."

Indeed, our cosmic address is getting excruciatingly long: Planet No. 3, Solar System, Orion Spur on the Sagittarius Spiral Arm, Milky Way, Local Cluster, Virgo Supercluster, Universe, Multiverse.

It's time for earthlings to acknowledge our minor-league status and collectively grasp the magnificent vastness that engulfs us all. While a widespread recognition of Earth's humble station is unlikely to end conflict here, fully comprehending our planet's infinitesimal place in the universe might be a modest step toward diminishing our hubris. Earth is but a speck, the cosmic equivalent of a subatomic particle hovering within an immensity spanning billions of light-years.

And we can still savor our cleverness in figuring this out.

Image Credits: (top) Sagittarius Star Cloud (Hubble Heritage); (lower) Imagined Multiverse (Nature)

Shedding a Tear for 40th Anniversary of Moon Landing

My father often liked to tell this story. In 1930, when he was eight years old, he saw an advertisement in a magazine depicting a series of yearly calendars going off into the distance. The very last calendar was 1960, a time to him so distant he couldn't imagine ever getting there.

I had my own "calendar moment" in 1968. Instead of a magazine ad, it was a movie. Sitting in the darkened theater, seeing the opening credits for 2001: A Space Odyssey come onto the screen, I couldn't quite comprehend that I would someday enter the 21st century. It seemed a fantasy. But when and if I did make it to the next millennium, it would surely be populated with videophones, space station hotels, and PanAm space stewardesses. I soon had proof we were on our way. Within a year, on July 20, 1969, two men landed on the Moon and CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite wiped away a tear when they did.

2001 has now come and gone. We have videophones and a far less luxurious space station, but no longer any presence on the Moon. The last astronauts to journey across the dusty soil did so in 1972, nearly four decades ago. Who knew that Cronkite's tear of joy would turn into a tear of disappointment for those of us who longed for the life of 2001 to come true.


Image Credits: (top) Walter Cronkite (CBS News); (bottom) Space Station Hilton Hotel (from 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Goldilocks and the Black Hole

It’s like Goldilocks and her three bears. For decades, astronomers have identified either supermassive black holes, each a huge entity containing the mass of millions to billions of Suns and sitting smack dab in the heart of a galaxy, or far smaller ones weighing anywhere from three to twenty solar masses. But now astronomers in France, using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-Ray Space Telescope, have spotted a black hole that’s more toward the middle. Goldilocks might even say it’s “just right.” In a galaxy far, far away—some 290 million light-years from Earth—the observers detected the unique x-ray signature of a medium-sized hole that contains more than 500 times the mass of our Sun. Labeled HLX-1, this source offers the best evidence yet for what theorists have long suspected: that black holes come in a wide range of sizes, not just extra large or petite.


The first hint that black holes might exist in the real universe arrived in 1939 when J. Robert Oppenheimer (who later headed the Manhattan Project that constructed the first atomic bomb) and his student Hartland Snyder published a paper showing that if a dying star had enough mass it could gravitationally collapse in a wink and be crushed to a singular point. The result: space-time gets so warped around this collapsed star that it literally closes itself off from the rest of the universe. “Only its gravitational field persists,” reported Oppenheimer and Snyder.

But astronomers at the time weren’t ready to believe that such bizarre objects could possibly inhabit, what seemed at the time, their calm and serene universe. Even Einstein wrote a paper attempting to prove that they were impossible to form.

We have the late Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler to thank for reinvigorating this line of research back in the 1960s, while all others ignored it. Confident at first that some kind of force would surely step in to halt this horrific stellar contraction, Wheeler saw in his equations that nothing—absolutely nothing—could prevent the collapse. The plummet into the abyss was inevitable.

Wheeler went on the lecture circuit to discuss his theoretical findings, aided by the discovery of pulsars, not yet understood in 1967 to be spinning neutron stars but surely proving that strange celestial objects lurk in the dark envelope of space. Wheeler at the time lectured that astronomers should consider the possibility that the pulsars were “gravitationally collapsed objects,” as he then awkwardly called them. “Well, after I used that phrase four or five times, somebody in the audience said, ‘Why don’t you call it a black hole?’ So I adopted that,” Wheeler told me as I was researching my book Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony. Some of Wheeler's associates, though, suspect he carefully crafted the term himself after years of thought. Whatever the origin, the name became official and went into the scientific lexicon. Nature’s weirdest object, resisted by astronomers for so many decades, is now taken for granted. And, as witnessed by the latest data from the XXM-Newton space telescope, the evidence for the existence of black holes is piling up daily.

Above images: (1) Artist's impression of the new source HLX-1 (represented by the light blue object to the top left of the galactic bulge) in the periphery of the edge-on spiral galaxy ESO 243-49 (Credit: Heidi Sagerud); (2) John Wheeler in 1967, at the time he coined the term "black hole." (New York Times)

Galileo for a Day

It looks rather mundane, like an extra-long paper-towel tube: a blotchy brown cylinder about three feet long and two inches wide made out of wood and varnished paper, all held together by rings of metal wire. Now on display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, this object is, in reality, a telescope made by Galileo, one of only two still in existence.



I was fortunate to be at the Institute last week, scheduled to give an evening lecture. Arriving early, I had time to peruse the Galileo exhibition and to my delight found the rooms, filled with astronomical artifacts from the Renaissance, deserted. Walking by the astrolabes, compasses, and quadrants, I turned a corner, and there it was: Galileo’s telescope, perched at an angle on two transparent rods. It was enclosed in a tall glass case, standing solitary and majestic on the polished wooden floor. I was alone with one of the greatest artifacts in astronomical history.

Despite the instrument's plain appearance, it took my breath away. No one is sure what discoveries Galileo made with this specific telescope (he constructed many), but the aura of fame still surrounds it. I was able to kneel down to position my eye within an inch of the eyepiece, separated only by the glass case. Peering down the tube, which holds Galileo’s original lenses, I saw a blurry white spot. Alas, just the museum ceiling. But in my imagination, I was sighting the phases of Venus, mountains on the Moon, and Jupiter’s satellites for the very first time, just as Galileo did four hundred years ago.


Above image: White-gloved representatives of Instituto e Museo Nazionale di Storia della Scienza in Florence, Italy, place the Galileo telescope into its glass display case at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Reuters)

The Oprahs of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Admit it. You experienced it, too, during your introductory astronomy course in college. You gritted your teeth through the early-semester lectures on those long-haired astronomers of old. Who wanted to hear about ancient astronomy when more exciting and modern events—black hole formation, colliding galaxies, and the Big Bang—awaited you in weeks to come.

But there’s plenty to keep students both informed and entertained as instructors build that historic foundation, so necessary to understanding current celestial matters. It can be found in the original sources. Back in the 16th century, scientific communication was far more relaxed—it could be quite humorous at times and often confessional. Take Nicolaus Copernicus, for example, the administrative canon who boldly placed the Sun at the center of the solar system (and hence the universe). In doing this, he also put Earth into motion.

But how did Copernicus open his famous work, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres? Actually, in a way that would make Oprah proud: “I can reckon easily enough…,” he wrote in 1543, “that as soon as certain people learn that in these books of mine which I have written about the revolutions of the spheres of the world I attribute certain motions to the terrestrial globe, they will immediately shout to have me and my opinion hooted off the stage….The scorn which I had to fear on account of the newness and absurdity of my opinion almost drove me to abandon a work already undertaken.”

You don’t see such candor in the Astrophysical Journal these days. It’s downright refreshing.

Then there’s Johannes Kepler, whose portrait looks like Santa Claus in his youth. Like others, I thought of Kepler as one of those “dead white men” of astronomy. He was the one who proved that planetary orbits are ellipses, not circles, which was crucial to Isaac Newton’s establishing in 1687 his revolutionary theory of gravity. But all the fun is in how Kepler explained his proof in a book titled Astronomia nova, the most unusual (and frank) account of a discovery I've ever seen. With seventy chapters dense with charts, computations, and diagrams, it was written as the noted German mathematician progressed through his tortuous calculations concerning the orbit of Mars. His dead ends and blind alleys are included side by side with his successes.

Chapter by chapter he plugs numbers into his models and with a seasoned wit shares his gripes with the reader. “If this wearisome method has filled you with loathing,” he writes in Chapter 16, “it should more properly fill you with compassion for me, as I have gone through it at least seventy times….” He’s still moving through his myriad computations into Chapter 50: “How small a heap of grain we have gathered from this threshing! But you also see what a huge cloud of husks there is now.”

The struggle became his personal “war with Mars,” his enemy. “And now," he wrote, "there is not much to prevent the fugitive enemy’s joining forces with his fellow rebels and reducing me to desperation, unless I send new reinforcements of physical reasoning in a hurry to the scattered troops and old stragglers….”

Kepler at last won his battle with Mars in 1609, exactly four hundred years ago. For more information on these episodes, I recommend perusing my book Archives of the Universe: 100 Discoveries That Transformed Our Understanding of the Cosmos.

Above photos, from top to bottom: (1) Copernicus with his heliocentric model of the universe and (2) Kepler, a portrait done around 1610 when he was 39.

It Should Have Been 2010

For astronomy aficionados, it’s old news: 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. But in case you haven’t heard, this celebration is now occurring in honor of Galileo, who four hundred years ago first peered at the heavens with his homemade “optical tube.” (The word telescope wasn’t coined until 1611.)


I wish astronomy officials had waited until 2010, in order to commemorate Galileo’s famous book Sidereus nuncius (“The Sidereal Messenger” or “The Starry Messenger”), a compilation of the notes and letters he wrote during his first months of observation. Others were beginning to look at the nighttime sky with spyglasses (for one, Thomas Harriot in England), but Galileo was the first to publish, providing a keen analysis of his observations. It was Sidereus nuncius, a best seller in the spring of 1610, that made Galileo famous. That’s when the professor, then 46 years old, became the A-list celebrity of his time. The public was mesmerized by his reports of craggy mountains on the Moon, a Milky Way composed of myriad stars, and moons circling the planet Jupiter—all previously unknown. 2010 seems a more fitting time for a year-long salute to astronomy. It also wouldn’t have competed with the “Year of Darwin,” also now going on to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

But who am I, a humble science writer, to challenge the all-powerful Oz. . .er, International Astronomy Union. So, I’m doing my bit for the cause. Natural History magazine will be excerpting a few sections from my latest book, The Day We Found the Universe, over the course of the year as a way of joining the celebration and recognizing, as the editors put it, “the events and scientists that have advanced our understanding of the cosmos during the last hundred years.” The first article, a selection from my book’s preface, is now out in the magazine’s June issue.

Above photo: Five pages from Sidereus nuncius, including Galileo's drawings of the Moon.

Fasten Your Seat Belt

I envy actors. They get their reviews in one, fell swoop—both good and bad. For authors, it’s a slow, agonizing process that begins even before their latest work is out on the bookshelves. First come the pre-reviews in the publishing industry press, such as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist, which give bookstore owners and librarians a heads-up on the upcoming winners—and clunkers—coming their way. It lets them know what to order….and what to avoid. For authors, it’s like an out-of-town try-out: a forecast of their new “baby’s” reception.

I was fortunate. My latest book, The Day We Found the Universe, survived this first round. Every one of these early reviews was positive, with nary a disapproving comment. I even garnered the cherished “starred review” from Publishers Weekly, the industry’s equivalent of two thumbs up or the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. I was luxuriating in adjective heaven; the reviewers used such words as “vivid,” “remarkable,” “lively,” and “dynamic” to describe my prose. This can be dangerous, making you forget to fasten your seat belt for the unexpected “bumps” in the newspaper and magazine reviews to come.

For me, that wallop arrived on Sunday, April 26, in the Sunday Washington Post. It started off swell. Post reporter Joel Achenbach said right up front that “Bartusiak’s intelligent and engaging book may well become the standard popular account” about the birth of modern cosmology. I couldn’t have asked for a better blurb. But then came the dreaded on-the-other-hand: he despaired at the comprehensiveness of my tale, “at the arrival on the scene of yet another astronomer, yet another telescope, yet another set of photographic plates.” To me, it was like saying that Civil War book would be terrific if it weren’t for the arrival of yet another damn battle. But then I recovered when he wrote that my book is ultimately “about how hard science is, how taxing, particularly when you are trying to excavate truth from a grudging universe”—a beautiful way of rendering exactly what I intended in writing this book. Thanks, Joel.

From then on, it was clear sailing. Seed magazine said I offered my “trademark mix of meticulous research and vibrant prose”; New Scientist called the book “highly readable”; and Science News noted its “moments of drama and intimacy.” Oddly, several reviewers went out of their way to use the word “accessible” to describe my book, which makes me believe that many people readily assume that a science-themed book is going to be tough going. As a professor of science writing, I long for the day when that notion will no longer be automatic and work hard in helping my students make that happen.

My latest glee arose with Ben Cosgrove’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, May 17. He called my book “a small wonder” and described me as “a science writer of rare gifts.” Whew! My head is swelling as I type this. Time to fasten on that seat belt once again for the inevitable bump to come.

Click here to see excerpts from all the reviews of The Day We Found the Universe.

Above photo: Man Reading a Newspaper by Oskar Hoffmann, 1902 (Art Museum of Estonia)