Galaxy Brain Is Real

In December 1995, astronomers around the world were vying for the chance to use the most fashionable new instrument in astronomy: the Hubble Space Telescope. Bob Williams didn’t have to worry about any of this. As the director of the institute that ran Hubble, Williams could use the telescope to observe whatever he wanted. And he decided to bet on nothing in particular.

© NASA / The Hubble Heritage Team / STScI / AURA
The sombrero galaxy (M104)

Williams’ colleagues told him, as politely as possible, that it was a horrible idea. But Williams had a feeling that Hubble would see something useful. The telescope had already captured the glow of distant galaxies, and the longer Hubble looked in one direction, the more light it would detect.

Then the Hubble telescope stared at the same piece of space, non-stop, for 10 days – precious time on a very expensive machine – taking an exposure after exposure as it circled the Earth. The resulting image was stunning: some 3,000 galaxies sparkled like precious stones in the dark. The view stretched billions of years back in time, revealing other cosmic places as they were when their light left them and began to skirt the universe.

“I still love looking at that image,” Williams told me earlier this year as Hubble celebrated its 30th anniversary in space.

Hubble, the most powerful telescope in orbit, is still producing dazzling observations of near and distant targets, from the familiar planets of our solar system to the mysterious suns of other worlds. The mission may be one of the easiest scientific endeavors to maintain in the midst of a plague. When I visited the Hubble Mission Operations Center in Maryland last December, only one person sat in the control room, all the staff that were needed to operate the mostly automated telescope and, three months later, when the state reported his first COVID-19 case, just the right number to avoid tangling with a virus that thrived at close range.

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A region of cosmic gas and dust (Herbig-Haro Jet HH 24) (NASA / ESA)

Hubble has a fairly clear view of the universe from its orbiting perch, away from the deforming atmosphere and blocking cosmic light from beyond. His images are, to use a very unscientific word, beautiful. You don’t have to be an astronomer or know that the galaxy you are observing is called NGC 2525 to appreciate them. These images can serve as momentary distractions, little bursts of wonder, and might even be good for the mind. At a time when the coronavirus has shrunk to the world of so many people, Hubble can still provide a long-term view: a glimpse of places that exist beyond ourselves.

Imagine seeing a panoramic view somewhere on Earth, such as the rim of the Grand Canyon or the shore of an ocean that extends beyond the horizon line. As your brain processes the sight and its vastness, feelings of awe come into play. Looking at a photo isn’t the same, but we may get a dose of it when we look at a particularly sparkling Hubble image of a star cluster. The experience of awe, whether on top of a mountain or sitting in front of a computer screen, can lead to “a diminished sense of self,” a phrase psychologists use to describe feelings of smallness or insignificance in front of you. of something greater than oneself. As alarming as it may sound, research has shown that feeling can be a good thing – a shot of awe can increase feelings of connection with other people.

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Jupiter and Saturn (NASA / ESA)

“Some people get the feeling when they look across millions of light years, that our ups and downs are ultimately meaningless on that scale,” says David Yaden, a psychology researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine who has studied self experiences. transcendent, even in astronauts. “But I think [space images] it can also draw our attention to the preciousness of local meaning: our loved ones, the people close to us, this Earth. It’s not a leap that I think always occurs, but I think the benefits flow to the people who do. “

The experience is like a miniature version of the “panoramic effect,” the mental shift many astronauts have experienced after seeing Earth as it is, a glittering planet suspended in dark, precious and precarious nothingness. Astronauts have expressed this feeling in lovely words over the years, but few have succinctly described it as Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who saw the Earth from the moon in 1971: “An instant global consciousness develops. , an orientation to people, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it. “

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A sparkling nebula (NGC 2070) (NASA / ESA)

Most of us are not astronauts and we will never see “the big picture” that way. On Earth, photos of a giant orbiting telescope, capturing the magnitude of the cosmos, are as close as we can get. The appeal of these images is enduring enough that a website called Astronomy Picture of the Day has been around since 1995, the year Hubble reached a dark void and tore up glittering treasures. The site looks the same as it did 25 years ago, with the no-nonsense Times New Roman look of the first Internet. Robert Nemiroff, an astronomer at Michigan Tech and co-founder of the website, told me that page views were up about 75 percent from last year, starting at a peak in April. These visitors left no clue as to their intentions: perhaps people were simply spending more time online, locked inside; perhaps they were looking for a jolt of feelings that would shake their perspective from within the walls of their home.

This is the hope of Judy Schmidt, who spends hours each week with Hubble observations. Schmidt, an amateur astronomer, sifts the data from the years-old telescope and cleans it, producing radiant images. Its forte is illuminating the shadows that 90’s computer software missed, uncovering features never seen before. In a way, Schmidt curates the cosmos and hangs them in the ether of the Internet, where people can pass, like visitors to a museum, and tilt their heads towards a particularly impressive piece of space that, for a moment, could make them. feel small, but reassuringly. “I just hope their life has improved for just the few seconds it took them to look at it and they thought, Wow, it’s out there“, Schmidt told me.