As evening wore on, Joshua’s wife Sarah began to worry for her husband. His wasn’t the custom to be out late unannounced. The children too, grew curious, asking why father wasn't home for supper.
“Father must have got caught up in something,” Sarah assured the children. “Not to worry.”
After supper, Sarah busied herself cleaning their two room stone house. Samuel and Elizabeth occupied themselves outside in the twilight. Elizabeth piloted a great imaginary ship in front of the house, while Samuel ascended the magnificent central mast. Perched high in the crow’s nest of the upper branches, Samuel trained keen eyes on the horizon, alert for plundering marauders and signs of friendly life. Only faint plumes of smoke from the direction of the village rose to the level of the birds and puffy clouds in the evening sky.
Time passed, and the glow of the western sun faded to black. Sarah came outside to gather the children for bed. “Any sign of the admiral, Matey?” she called up to Samuel.
“No ma’am,” Samuel replied as he climbed down the tree.
“Come inside,” Mother encouraged. “It’s bedtime.”
Elizabeth toddled forward and wrapped her arms around her mother, looking up with big doe eyes. “Can’t we wait for father?”
“We’ll see him when we wake up, darling,” Sarah whispered, leaning over and kissing Elizabeth’s forehead.
Walking back to the house Sarah stopped and looked down the long winding trail to the village. All was dark in the forest; still, she was compelled to look. As night covered the land, Sarah led the children inside and tucked them in bed.
After prayers, Sarah moved a lit lamp out to hang beside the door. There she sat to wait for Joshua.
Crickets and tree frogs called for their mates in the night, capturing Sarah’s attention. Who else is calling in darkness, she wondered? For many minutes she put faces to the sounds as fireflies shown briefly bright on occasion only to disappear in the void.
Sarah was near to turning into bed herself when footsteps sounded on the trail coming nearer to the house. Joshua! Sarah thought. She felt a grand relief that he was home at last. Quickly she rose and walked to meet him.
“Where have you been?” she asked, causing the still wakeful Samuel to spring from bed and rush to the door.
“Sarah,” a voice replied.
Sarah stopped in her tracks. She was startled that the shadowy figure walking toward her wasn’t her husband.
“It’s me, Gene,” the voice came again.
Sarah recognized her neighbor’s voice. His house was on the way to the village. “Hello Gene.”
“I’ve got bad news,” Gene continued. “Is Joshua here?”
“No, he went to the village this morning. What’s wrong?” Sarah asked, but she grew lightheaded and didn’t really want to hear the answer.
“I think I’ve found him,” Gene reported. “Somebody’s been murdered on the road to town.”
Immediately Sarah’s knees buckled and she fell to the ground like a severed vine, with trembling hands clutched to her face. Her shock and horror was so great that she didn’t notice Samuel race past, down the trail toward town.
“Father!... Father!...” he cried; tears streaming down his tender face as he charged into the darkness with his heart on his sleeve. “Father!!!...”
What manner of idea could cause such despair?
Searching for answers, Sarah asked why? as she looked to the vast black void of heaven speckled with the faint light of distant stars on that moonless night. Wondering if she had a purpose, or if she was as a speck of dust blowing in a cold cosmic wind, she begged God to reveal himself; or, in the alternative, reveal some just cause or meaning for her family. How, she asked, could God purposefully will harm to the innocent, or ignore their cries for mercy?
Quiet hung in the air, as no response came forth. There, exposed to infinite space with a cool breeze on her cheek, Sarah changed. As the tears fell she finally came to a realization, an awakening. Things began to make sense to her, unlike all that she was told in the past. Sarah’s revelation did, however, run directly contrary to beliefs she had held deeply since childhood. Much of what she believed was, by all appearances, a grand illusion.
There in the empty night shadow some of her emotion died. Lost in the thin air was some capacity to love, and to fear. Gone was happiness and hope. All that remained, by only a tenuous grip, was resolve; resolve now inspired only by her love of Samuel, that felt like a stone in her stomach; cold, hard and detached; a force without direction.
For all of the great distance of space she beheld, there was sign of neither paradise nor magic. Like all that had come before, she saw only specks of light in a sea of black. Was it the mystery of the unknown that made room for rampant hypothesis? Or did the mystery of space demand explanation: even absolute explanations?
As long as mankind has reasoned and questioned the nature of things, people have sought to understand; or in the least, explain what’s not easily known. And as until recently men could neither reach out to space nor see details beyond primitive perspective; they were left to theorize the forms, motions, substance and breadth of the overworld.
Although theories and practices often lacked both understanding and good judgment, reverence for the sky and celestial bodies is easily understood. For unlike today, our ancestors weren’t isolated and insulated from their environment. When it rained they were wet, when bitterly cold winds blew, they shivered and froze; and in times of drought they died of thirst. Today people view the world through glass windows in cozy houses and cars. It’s more of a rarity today to hear the rush of wind through branches reaching overhead to the dark sky and feel the chill in one’s bones; but for billions of years that was the way, day after day after day.
In a world of marginal survival it’s easy to see why people sought favor and were captivated by the mystery of the sky. As lord to the subjects, how great the wrath of the fickle beast has been as it unleashed howling typhoons and roaring tornados, flooding rains, searing lightning and ground shaking thunder to accompany bitter cold and sweltering heat. But, despite the thorough immersion, the universe and man’s relationship to it has proven remarkably difficult to understand.
Though for most aspects of daily lives and survival it hasn’t been necessary to know the secrets of space, people have systematically studied and observed the sky, notably the night sky, for thousands of years. It wasn’t necessity, but curiosity and the desire to advance knowledge that led people to make some of the most basic, yet startling discoveries. Surprisingly, the shape and motion of our own world was so long a mystery, due in no small part to man's conviction of his own intelligence. How could man learn the truth of an orbiting planet when he knew he was standing on unmoving ground like he knew the nose on his face?
No matter of reason could teach so many people what they thought they already knew. That the sun orbited Earth was a fact even god was sure of. And because life giving sunshine and rain come from above and people placed their dead friends and relatives in the ground that occasionally erupted with fiery violence, it was easy to imagine a heaven above and sulfurous, fiery world of the dead below.
Generation after generation wondered what form of matter held the stars in the sky, be it aether or crystal globes, and on what occasion the stars fell to Earth and died in a sudden, brief blaze of glory. As mankind yearned to explain those and other matters not understood, various myths evolved to explain the flat, motionless world, the underworld below, and firmament above.
As the sun is far and away the most important celestial body to earthlings, it’s been the subject of a great many theories that proved false in time. One of the ancient religions that attempted to explain the universe developed in Egypt. The Egyptians believed the sun god Ra crossed the sky in a boat called a barque before entering the underworld at night to travel back to the east for the next day’s journey. In similar fashion Celtic tribes of Europe applied their technology and customs to model the sun being pulled across the sky in a horse-drawn chariot.
Unlike those ideas, other celestial beliefs, deeply rooted in struggle and conquest, were more reflective of savage ferocity. Take, for example, sun worship by the Aztecs of Mexico. Aztec priests ritually sacrificed many thousands of people in ceremonies designed to feed the sun god. Without human blood, it was alleged, the sun god would die, and all earthly life with it, as happened to the four previous worlds. With knives of chipped obsidian or other stone, priests cut open the abdomens of the living sacrifices, reached inside the victims and ripped out their still beating hearts to offer to the sun.
Though the Aztecs knew nothing of the sun’s life cycle, they really didn’t need to, since their simple, brutal way of life had no more bearing on the sun than animal sacrifices to the god of the Jews and later Christians and Muslims. Like all of man’s gods, it was a mystery whether Huitzilopochtli was a savage beast born to serve his creators, or they him. The Aztecs created a bloodthirsty god lusting for conquest by a warrior nation. But in the end, Huitzilopochtli was slain not by truth, but was conquered by a god pledged to devour all the earth with the fire of his jealousy.
Despite often repressive cultures of learning and fixation on magic, as opposed to objective observation, there was, in time, occasional, if rare, breakthroughs of discovery that eventually changed human perception of the world and man’s place in the universe. A combination of curiosity and quest for privilege kept pushing people to explore and observe. Not only did they seek the truth for the sake of knowledge, they ever hoped to discover secrets otherwise unknown, and find their own destiny in cosmic alignments and constellations. If not for that desire to gain advantage people may have been satisfied with the popular theories. But, in observing and learning, it became more and more impractical to correlate fantasy and reality. One by one, implausible foundations of the massive pyramid of ideology crumbled under the weight of scientific discovery.
Through the ages numerous societies in the Middle East, India, China and elsewhere contributed to astronomy: the study of the physical universe. Though many of those societies were more interested in correlating celestial events with their own lives through religion and astrology than understanding the true functions of the universe, they nonetheless contributed to a growing body of celestial knowledge. However, much of the information they gathered through the ages was of little use at the time because they didn’t yet understand what their observations revealed about space. More often they contributed to a growing base of data that could be used to chart celestial motion and track changes in time.
Chinese astronomers noted such memorable events as solar eclipses, meteor showers, and supernova explosions (which they noted as temporarily visible guest stars), going back as far as 4,000 BC. And by approximately 1,000 BC people living in what is now China had measured the angular difference between the equatorial plane and Earth’s orbital plane. That difference, called the obliquity of the ecliptic, is the cause of seasonal variation as the Earth orbits the sun, although at the time the Chinese didn’t necessarily realize the Earth orbits the sun. If the equatorial and orbital planes were the same, the equator would always be oriented toward the sun, so from Earth the sun would appear directly over the equator all year and there would be no annual seasonal variation of summer and winter, other than imperceptible variance due to the slightly elliptic shape of Earth’s orbit.
And Babylon contributed a great deal to early space study, with their sexagesimal (base 60) number system still used in time and geometric measurements. That’s the origin of today’s 60 minute hours and angular degrees, and 60 second minutes. Chaldeans of Mesopotamia also had a strong foundation of mathematics that helped contribute to their discovery that eclipses recurred in a repeating cycle known as a saros.
By observing and recording star positions over long periods of time, early astronomers noticed that most stars remained in fixed positions relative to the other stars. However, like the moon and sun, five stars appeared to move relative to the others, and they came to be called planets after the Greek term planetai, meaning wanderers. That relative motion was recognized as orbits by Babylonian and Chinese astronomers as early as 750 BC. And by approximately 500 BC the Babylonian astronomer Naburiannuto was predicting future positions of the sun, moon and planets.
To understand the significance ancient society associated with objects in the sky, consider that days were dedicated to the Sun, Moon and five known planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; resulting in the seven day week.
One of the most influential of ancient civilizations, the Greeks; and Hellenistic culture in general; also contributed much to the basic framework of modern astronomy. Considerable dialect in the learning institutions fostered a more scientific approach involving systematic study that developed hypotheses to be tested and debated for soundness. Some Greeks surmised that the sun, moon and stars are spheres formed by a convergence toward the center, what’s known as gravity today, and some even considered the stars more distant versions of the sun. In more technical work they also estimated precession and the circumference of the Earth.
Earth’s precession involves the slight change in direction of its rotational axis, like the wobble of a spinning top. And just as the Earth spins on its axis about once every 24 hours, that axis of rotation also slowly moves, or wobbles. Slight movement of Polaris, the north star, away from the north pole, and changes in the maximum and minimum inclination of the sun during summer and winter solstice over the years indicated Earth was wobbling. Modern scholars estimate the time for our planet to complete one of these cycles, or wobbles, to be about 25,800 years.
Ptolemy devised a solar system model in Hellenistic Egypt in the second century that could predict the positions of planets in the sky on any given date. It was apparently fairly accurate even though it was based on the erroneous geocentric (Earth centered) theory. Some Hellenistic thinkers, like counterparts in India, even developed theories of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, planetary system. But the concept of Earth and the other planets orbiting the sun didn’t gain acceptance; partially due to the fact that the theory’s detractors didn’t see the shift in the alignment of the stars that they expected to see if Earth was sweeping around the sun in orbit. Unfortunately, at the time they didn’t realize that the stars were much too distant to enable them to detect such minute deviation with the unaided eye.
Though they were 93 million miles short in their estimates, it’s no exaggeration that a lot of people used to think that the sun barely rose above the peaks of mountains. And even when astronomers began to understand that the sun and other objects visible in the sky were a lot larger and farther away than traditionally believed, they still had little idea just how big and how far away those objects were.
But still, the concept of a stationary Earth was the greatest single obstacle to astronomical understanding. It would take serious proof for people to believe that while standing apparently still on the face of the Earth they actually traveling at a very high rate of speed. For thousands of years raged the debate of a moving Earth. And even today people are still astonished to find out how fast they’re traveling. Man’s home planet orbits the sun at the average rate of approximately 66,615 mph. And because Earth spins, in addition to flying around the sun in orbit, a point on the equator is moving approximately 1,040 mph due to planetary rotation alone. That velocity due to rotation, of course, decreases toward the axis of rotation at the north and south poles to a negligible amount.
The very concept of their own velocity causes people to doubt and ask how it’s possible they don’t notice they’re moving so fast. The answer to that question is quite simple. We don’t notice Earth’s velocity, and our own, because they’re the same, and motion is relative. The planet and everything on it, including the atmosphere around it, is traveling together, so that it all moves as one.
We're accustomed to thinking of velocity in absolute terms, such as a 55 mph speed limit. But that speed is actually relative to the surface of the planet on which people are driving, it doesn’t take into account the velocity of Earth itself. That’s fine however, because motion relative to the local environment is the motion relevant to driving. In fact, all observed motion is relative, for if there is no point of reference such as the case would be in an infinite void of space, there can be no observed motion and no way of knowing speed, distance or direction. Since Earth’s motion is smooth and steady, because forces affecting that motion are essentially in equilibrium, there’s normally no occasion to notice movement relative to the rest of the universe except the apparent movement of celestial objects.
After the decline of Hellenistic study, astronomy work continued in Persia and India, as it had for many generations, adding to mathematical calculations and helping to keep progressive ideas afloat. Although time and vagueness of reference obscure the exact meaning of ancient writings, traditions and teachings, enough variety of thought survived the centuries to keep the fires of advancement and alternative theory stoked. Some of that knowledge was transferred to Muslim Spain, and some was picked up by traders and travelers to be diffused through Europe when the arts and sciences finally began to blossom during the period which came to be known as the Renaissance.
Through the ages revolving Earth and heliocentric models sporadically popped up in scientific circles, only to be rejected by the mainstream. Even the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies in 1543, the year of his death, didn’t convert the masses to believing in an orbiting Earth. Added to people’s natural objection to the idea of living on a speeding planet was the Roman Catholic Church’s insistence on an unmoving, central Earth.
Pope Alexander VII declared in a Papal Bull that "the Pythagorean doctrine concerning the mobility of the Earth and the immobility of the sun is false and altogether incompatible with divine Scripture" and he went on to say the principles advocated by Copernicus on the position and movement of the Earth were “repugnant to Scripture and to its true and Catholic interpretation." Well, when the Pope, the man in communication with the all-knowing, all-powerful God, gives infallible word that the Earth is indeed the stationary center of the universe, around which all else revolves, the case was closed. At least it was for the population conditioned to believe in gods and popes. But some people weren’t satisfied with myth and wanted to find the truth of the matter.
When the famous scientist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, the first man to study the sky with a telescope, championed the Copernican heliocentric model, his work was added to the Index of Forbidden Books along with the work of Copernicus; and in 1615 he presented himself to Rome for interrogation by the Inquisition. In 1616 he was ordered not to advocate Copernicism as truth. But after his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was published in Florence in 1632 he was again ordered before the inquisition and tried by the Holy Office in 1633 for heresy; the contradiction of accepted church doctrine. As a result, Galileo, a man that knew more than all the church officers combined, was made to recant his position and sentenced to life imprisonment, dying under house arrest in 1642.
Johannes Kepler, a contemporary of Galileo whose product, not surprisingly, was also banned by the church, explained planetary orbits and the attractive force of the sun in works published from 1596 to 1619. Kepler’s efforts involving motion and attraction between bodies influenced the famous English physicist Isaac Newton. Like astronomers before them, Kepler and Newton applied the most advanced mathematics available to their work and significantly contributed to the field of mathematics themselves, notably in the field of calculus which Newton is credited with introducing. Newton helped prove Kepler’s rules of orbital motion and further described the attractive force between bodies that he called gravity, even demonstrating its universal effect. With that revelation objects no longer simply fell down, but were attracted to other objects.
As technological advancements continued to add to man’s ability to see farther and with more precision, the astronomical community was finally able to apply the concept of parallax to measure star distance in 1838. After almost two thousand years, the proof of stellar parallax predicted by heliocentric models was observable with the aid of telescopes. Today, powerful telescopes bring phenomena billions of light-years away into focus.
Light reflected from objects all around allows man to distinguish shapes, textures and colors; but light can tell so much more. When light passes through a prism it spreads into different color bands like a rainbow. But not all bands of the color spectrum are present. When light from space is compared with charts produced by the heating of known elements it can be determined what element produced the sample light. Further study of the light can help identify the temperature, size, age, distance and even relative motion of the star or other object that created it.
Considering that visible light is but one source of astronomical information, other phenomena also provide valuable clues to the workings of the universe. Scientists study many forms of space born energy, including all the regions of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays, to aid in determining such matters as distance, motion and composition of celestial bodies. Though all of the astronomical study and effort isn’t without error and contested theories, what shouldn’t be doubted is the enormous magnitude of the universe.
It’s with good reason people look deep into the night sky and marvel at their own insignificance, gazing upon the splendor and vastness of space knowing they’ll never touch its wonders or travel its reaches. The scale of the universe is so great that this big, beautiful world with its deep, vast oceans, great deserts, huge ice sheets and majestic mountains is smaller than the persistent cyclonic storm called the great red spot in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and that disturbance is about half as large as it was a hundred years ago. Jupiter itself is 317 times more massive than Earth.
As massive as Jupiter is, the sun is the dominant body of its namesake system; containing more than 99% of the matter in the solar system and being more than a million times larger than Earth. As a main sequence star, meaning it’s in the long hydrogen fusion stage of its life cycle, it radiates approximately four million tons of matter into space every second as light and other energy. Given its awesome mass and prolific radiation, the sun is estimated to be about half way through a 10 billion year life span, roughly 133 million times as long as the life of a modern person. Even though some of the stars seen flickering in the night sky are larger than the sun, they’re but tiny specks of light in the vast, cold, black sea of space.
The sun’s light travels approximately 93 million miles to Earth (the distance varies due to our planet's slightly elliptical orbit) in a little over 8 minutes at about 186,000 miles per second. In little more than the time it takes the fastest human to run 100 meters light travels almost 2 million miles. A light-year, the distance light travels through space in a year, is about 5,879,000,000,000 (almost 6 trillion) miles. Even at such astonishing speed the faint light of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf and the nearest star to our sun, takes more than four years to reach Earth.
Proxima Centauri and the other stars of the constellation Centaurus, and all of the stars visible to our unaided eyes belong to our local galaxy, the Milky Way, along with hundreds of billions more stars. The Milky Way is believed to span a distance of 80,000 – 100,000 light-years. And this massive conglomeration of nebulae, stars and their planetary systems, and a possible black hole, and various other bodies and matter, is but one of countless such galaxies. Scientists estimate that the universe thus far observed is 28 billion light-years across. But, regardless of the accuracy of such measurements, people will always be left asking what’s beyond? With no limit to space, any exercise to quantify the bodies or distance or scale of space is an exercise in futility. What is infinite cannot be measured. And, conversely, what can be measured, like a lifespan, is limited.
For all of the apparent vast, cold, nothingness; space is animated with motion and energy. Even that which seems void, such as the space between planets, isn’t entirely empty. Certainly, such space contains passing light and other energy, and possibly matter too faint to detect, through which gravitational and magnetic forces might act. Some areas of space are occupied by clouds of matter, similar to clouds of water vapor in the sky.
Like water molecules combining and eventually forming raindrops, matter as fine as gas and dust accrete, or coalesce, in gigantic debris clouds to form objects of increasing mass. While the initial attraction may be electrical attraction on a molecular scale, gravitational pull increases as objects grow larger. As more distant matter and objects are attracted to the growing mass, gravity squeezes the internal matter, deforming and compacting it, and generating frictional heat to which may be added heat from meteor impacts. As objects reach the size of large asteroids and small moons, internal temperatures and pressures can become great enough to plasticize the aggregate matter into a spherical shape with the appearance of a dwarf planet.
For some of the largest bodies, internal pressure becomes so great that atoms in the molten core begin to fuse and trigger an expanding nuclear reaction, giving birth to a star – a great ball of luminous plasma. As stars radiate energy by fusing elements into heavier elements, they eventually reach a point where they don’t have enough heat and pressure to fuse the newer, heavier elements. Some of those heavy elements, like iron, are very stable and require much greater energy to fuse together to form even heavier elements.
When the nuclear fusion reaction fades it’s believed that some stars slowly burn out, while in more massive stars the force of gravity is believed to overwhelm the declining expansive forces of heat and radiation causing an implosion with accompanying shockwaves so violent they cause supernova explosions in which star matter is ejected into space. Eventually much of the matter that coalesced from the debris cloud to first form the star is returned to space through radiation or explosive force to possibly contribute to another object in the circle of cosmic life.
Astronomers and physicists wonder at the incredible forces necessary to manifest such spectacular phenomena as supernova, quasars and even black holes. Ironically, all the great bodies and massive objects of the known universe are made of tiny subatomic particles too small to see with even our most advanced technology. And all of the incredible force and energy produced by the largest, brightest stars, exploding supernova, and colliding galaxies derives from the same invisible forces of attraction and repulsion of those tiny particles. Though the variety of sub-atomic particles responsible for phenomenal cosmic power and enormous size may be quite limited, the variety of the