AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter January 1996 More Things in Heaven and Earth... And Getting Stranger By the Day by Brenda Forman drbforman@aol.com When was the last time you actually saw stars? Not The comical sort circling Wylie Coyote,s head whenever the Roadrunner snookers him yet again, but the genuine item, strewn across the sky with reckless splendor, unimaginably distant, indifferent to our admiration and oblivious of our very existence. Their glory defies description -- but the skies of city-dwellers such as we are lit more often by neon than stars. So when was the last time you actually saw them? This past Thanksgiving, I abandoned my habitual urban surroundings and traveled to a semi-rural area in upstate New York. And when night fell, I found myself staring at something whose barefaced glory I,d almost forgotten: the night sky, undimmed by the pervasive light pollution of our times, not even any moon, just a deep black sky thickly begemmed with uncounted millions of stars. The wonder of it hit me with an almost forgotten impact. This was the feeling that first drew me to the study of space and it was that feeling that came roaring back. with its signature combination of delight and unease, as I stood transfixed outside my brother,s house. I have gloated over the Hubble Space Telescope,s growing panoply of wondrous snapshots of the cosmos. I have rejoiced in modern astronomy,s accelerating roster of discoveries. But I realized with a start that it had been literally decades since I had actually seen real stars! I have lived my entire adult life in major metropolitan areas where the night sky is eternally lit by reflection from the cities below. It may be grey or pink or even yellow but never black, and the few stars brilliant enough to punch their way through the light pollution are few and far between. Seeing that undimmed spectacle afresh produces a singular shock of wonder -- and along with the wonder comes a genuine frission at the sheer strangeness of it all. When to its powerful visual impact you add the cascade of discoveries that modern astronomy is producing these days, that shiver of strangeness gets seriously intense. For modern astronomy is on a helluva roll! And every new discovery adds to the variety, immensity, and pure, glorious weirdness of the universe we inhabit. Just in the past year or two, we,ve ascertained the existence of three planets orbiting a pulsar in the constellation Virgo, plus what appears to be a Jupiter-like body orbiting another sun-like star, 51 Pegasus. Maybe they aren,t very homey planets by Earth standards buy by Jove, there they are and just maybe, some other life form thinks they,re Home Sweet Home. Then just to drive home the point that far from being rarities, solar systems are in all likelihood strewn throughout the galaxy, there are those proto-planetary discs just discovered surrounding stars in the center of the Orion Nebula. We,ve also finally found a genuine brown dwarf, a sort of cosmic starlet that didn,t quite make it to full stardom. Hitherto, it,s only been a theoretical concept but if there are more of them, they might help us account for that missing 90 percent of the universe,s mass that we haven,t quite managed as yet to identify. Most recently, there,s that indescribably glorious "star nursery" of multi-billion-mile sized hydrogen clouds that the Hubble Space Telescope just photographed in the Eagle Nebula. And it gets stranger by the day. The Hubble Space Telescope has produced some data that seems to suggest that some of the starts it sees are older then the universe itself. Go figure that one out! And meanwhile, back on Earth, we,ve discovered this microbe, Deinococcus radiodurans, that can reassemble its chromosomes after being blitzed with three thousand times the radiation that would kill any other life form we know. Some scientists are speculating that if this weird little critter had been cruising interstellar space and had picked up enough of a coating of what one scientist pithily termed interstellar crud, it might have survived the heat of atmospheric entry and seeded life on Earth -- or for all we know, other planets too. See what I mean? It get more wild, weird, and wonderful by the day. Newton,s orderly, clockwork universe has dissolved into something transcendently peculiar. The most fascinating question of all, of course. is how the devil we fit into it? Assuming, of course, that we do...