First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe

by Richard Preston

  Soon after first light on the Hale, a Palomar gadgeteer by the name of William (“Billy”) Baum had sent away in the mail for a huge pile of war-surplus electrical hot suits. The price: one dollar each. Pretty soon just about every astronomer in the United States had to have an electrically heated flight suit. The next time the observatory ordered a batch of hot suits, the price had risen 25 percent—gougers were already charging $1.25 apiece for them. An electrical suit could help neutralize the cold, but it did nothing for the curse of prime focus—the agony of the bladder. Schmidt usually took a break around midnight, but some astronomers did not. When you have been waiting for perhaps a year to get a few nights on the Big Eye, every minute on the telescope can seem valuable; much too valuable for the astronomer to spare a trip downstairs to urinate. This had led to bizarre practices. During recent years some of the electronic cameras in prime focus needed to be cooled with shaved dry ice. The astronomers would carry their dry ice up in a thermos bottle. Several times during the night they would pour ice chips into the camera, to keep the camera cold. Eventually the thermos bottle would be emptied of its chips, and the astronomer would then urinate into the bottle and tighten the cap. It is said that on at least one occasion a groggy astronomer had forgotten what he had done, and thinking his thermos contained ice chips, had poured a steaming thermosful of urine into an expensive scientific instrument at prime focus.

  The electrical hot suits deliver one kilowatt of heat at full power, and they are still in use on Palomar Mountain, festooned with duct tape and loose wires, although some of the younger astronomers consider those suits to be nothing more than execution shrouds. What if—heaven forbid—the curse of prime focus overwhelmed you and you pissed inside an electrical hot suit? You could be electrocuted, with a great sizzle and in a cloud of boiling urine. “You could burst into flames in prime focus,” Don Schneider remarked, “and you know, in space no one can hear you scream.”

  Rudolph Minkowski had all kinds of problems in prime focus. His electrical suit was too tight. He almost suffocated trying to put it on, until his wife finally opened it up and sewed a gusset into the paunch. Minkowski also had trouble learning how to use the telescope. Byron Hill, who had supervised construction of the telescope, showed Minkowski all the buttons on the control paddles in prime focus, and then Hill spent the night at the night assistant’s control desk (which in those days stood at the foot of the telescope) in order to help Minkowski, in case Minkowski needed help. All evening Hill would hear bangs and groans coming over the intercom. The telescope would keep swaying back and forth.

  “Do you need any help?”

  “I’m fine,” Minkowski growled.

  Toward morning, on one occasion, Byron Hill got fed up. The telescope was jerking all over the place. “What in the hell are you doing? Get your elbow off the paddle!” he shouted.

  “What of it? I’m doing it on purpose,” Minkowski said.

  During the next year Minkowski’s problems in prime focus deepened. The night assistants could hear him talking to himself, wheezing, grunting. He made a sound like a bear—“Uuuunnh!” The night assistants thought these sounds were so interesting that they made a tape recording of them and passed it around. Byron Hill finally figured out what was going on. The seat in prime focus was a hard wooden platter about half the size of Minkowski’s ass. “That little seat nearly killed Minkowski,” Hill recalled. “I couldn’t stand to think of the agony up there.” One day Hill drove down the mountain to a dealer of farm machinery and paid cash for a tractor seat. Hill said, “I went to a lot of trouble altering that seat to fit Minkowski. I built it up with padding. Then the rat went and took off forty pounds.”

  An astronomer at prime focus, sitting in the prime focus cage at the top of the Hale Telescope and staring into the great mirror at light coming out of the deep universe, as imagined by Russell W. Porter in 1940. The astronomer is wearing a tailored and pressed suit, with a pocket handkerchief and wing-tip shoes, and his hair is slicked back with some kind of pomade, maybe Wildroot Cream oil. Such a perfectly dressed astronomer is a purely theoretical being, and has never once worked at the Hale’s prime focus, a place known for bitter cold, long nights, pure ecstasy as the Big Eye swings through the stars—and the agony of the bladder, (Photograph courtesy of Palomar/Caltech)

  Smoking was strictly forbidden in prime focus, but prime focus reeked of cigarettes whenever Minkowski had been up there, although the astronomers could not figure out what he was doing with the butts. The night assistants knew. They said that Minkowski was tossing his butts out of the prime focus cage, where they often fell fifty feet down through the telescope and landed on the mirror. The mirror was a perfect ashtray, because when the telescope moved, any cigarette butts lying on the mirror would just roll into a gutter around the edge of the mirror and out of sight. The night assistants claimed that they had taken fistfuls of butts from around the mirror, which made Walter Baade’s hands shake just to think of it. Baade lectured Minkowski about the effects of ashes on Pyrex glass, to no avail. The Prime Focus Spectrograph was a frail scientific instrument, studded with knobs that tormented Minkowski. When he could not get a knob to turn the way he thought it should, he would give it what was called the Minkowski Treatment. First he would wrap a fist around the knob and really twist it. If the knob still refused to turn, Minkowski would utter one or two obscene remarks in German, throw his cigarette overboard, and produce a little pair of pliers from his pocket and absolutely destroy the knob. On one occasion Minkowski could not get the camera on the spectrograph to open up so that he could change photographic plates. The problem was a pair of wing nuts. The wing nuts would not loosen up, even when he worked at them with the pliers. He did not realize that he was turning them the wrong way, and was actually tightening them. The next day the engineering crew found that Minkowski had frozen the wing nuts, and they had to cut them off. They replaced them with clamps having knurled thumb grips, in order to encourage Minkowski to keep his pliers to himself, but, as Byron Hill said, “You could make the telescope astronomer-proof, but you could forget about making it Minkowski-proof.” Nevertheless, once Minkowski had gotten settled on the tractor seat with a cigarette and had gotten the colors of a radio galaxy streaming through the diamond dealer’s watch fob, Minkowski went into a kind of hibernation. His grunts mellowed into sighs, the Hale Telescope leaned over into the night, and Minkowski and the sky became one. Minkowski is one of the few members of the human species to have a galaxy named for him. Minkowski’s Object, a very peculiar galaxy, sits in the constellation Cetus, the Whale.

  On the night of December 27, 1962, Maarten Schmidt took a two-hour exposure of a bright star that lay next to the little radio streak known as 3C 273. He finished the exposure just before dawn. Breaking apart the camera, he slipped the tiny exposed plate into a lightproof box. He worked quickly, because during the moments when the plate was in the open air, a meteor could flash overhead, exposing the plate and ruining it. The next afternoon he developed his bits of glass in the darkroom. When they had dried, he studied them through a magnifying glass like a jeweler’s loupe, while jotting notes on the yellow graph paper that he used for recording his thoughts: “Dec. 27. 3C 273. This is the bright star at the end of the streak. Everything is strongly overexposed.”

  The star had practically roasted his plate. He noticed that the star was emitting strange colors. It was one of those radio stars: “There is a broad emission line at 3,250 [angstroms, a common measure of wavelength] … Also some fine regularly spaced emission lines around 3,400.… There must be much more, we need a lighter exposure.”

  The human mind forever wants to see tiger stripes in the forest. As it would turn out, there were no regular lines in that particular exposure. The plate was grossly overexposed.

  Two nights later, on December 29, having been busy with radio galaxies, Schmidt got around to taking another spectrum of the radio star. Looking at it through the eyepiece and tweaking the Hale Telescope, he watched
the star move onto the slit. He was really quite surprised at how bright this star was, at least by the standards of the Big Eye. He was used to looking at faint galaxies—galaxies that he could barely see when he stared down on them in the mirror. “You were always worrying as to whether you were seeing ghosts,” he would remember. “You spent a long time staring at the field while you were setting the telescope on the object. You had to use averted vision—look away to one side, and then you’d see the object, or maybe you wouldn’t see it. One time I spent four and a half hours taking a spectrum of a galaxy. When I developed it, I had an absolutely blank plate. I had totally imagined that galaxy.” This 3C 273 was no ghost. “It was outstandingly bright,” he recalled. “I could just barely see color in it. Optically it looked rather blue.” The following afternoon he saw that he had made a good exposure of it—he saw all kinds of emission lines. He decided that the faint streak next to the star must be some kind of a jet emerging from the star.

  He returned to Palomar Mountain at the end of January to work on more radio galaxies. He also tried to take more spectra of 3C 273. On the first night he overexposed another plate. He could not get used to photographing these bright stars. The following night he shot the star in a very brief exposure, and then he wore out the night trying to soak up a spectrum from the fine jet that protruded from the star. At break of day, feeling wobbly and eerie and happy, as he always did after working hard on the sky, Maarten reluctantly turned away from the eyepiece and returned to earth, holding, in his lightproof box, a few bits of glass containing what he believed were images of starlight. When he developed the plates, he saw that the long exposure of the jet had produced absolutely nothing: “Jet—needs further looking into.”

  He went back to Pasadena. He had taken several plates of 3C 273 by now. The spectrum showed six emission lines. As usual, the lines did not correspond to any known form of matter. He described the lines to colleagues, and nobody could explain them. Meanwhile the British journal Nature wanted to publish some articles on these peculiar radio stars. Maarten agreed to write an article.

  Down the hall from Maarten’s office in the Robinson building at Caltech, Jesse Greenstein had been working on an article for the Astrophysical Journal. Jesse believed that he had found the astonishing secret of a radio star called 3C 48, which was nothing less than this: that 3C 48 was a dwarf star glowing with heavy metals, such as curium, neptunium, and plutonium. One day he walked into Maarten’s office carrying a bulging manuscript that described his findings. It was forty-one pages long and contained fifteen tables and graphs. “This,” Jesse said, “is the best I can make of 3C 48. If you have any remarks, let me know within a week, and then I’ll send this off.” It hit Maarten’s desk with a heavy sound.

  “If I see anything funny, I’ll let you know,” Maarten replied.

  On February 5, 1963, Maarten Schmidt got down to business in his office to try to write his article for Nature. He placed some leaves of yellow graph paper on his desk (his manuscript paper) and laid out his glass plates of 3C 273. Each plate held a tiny black-and-white stripe, a spectrum. Some of the stripes were only a quarter of an inch long. He had mounted the plates on standard microscope slides with Scotch tape, and now he dusted them lightly with a rather elegantly patterned handkerchief and inserted the slides, one at a time, into a cast-iron microscope. He pulled off his glasses and squinted.

  Even in his best spectrum of 3C 273, the features were hard to see. The spectrum clouded the glass like a streak of smoke. The smoke thickened almost imperceptibly, here and there, into broad vertical bands. These bands were the emission lines. Always he worried that he was seeing ghosts. Schmidt could not get over the notion—which had hit him mistakenly, earlier on the mountain—that he was seeing something organized here, something proportional in these lines. The lines fell at decreasing intervals, going from red to blue, as if they were harmonics of an excited atom. He knew also of an invisible infrared line, discovered by J. Beverley Oke, which he could not see in his plates, but he realized that Oke’s invisible line would be spaced regularly with the others. So there would be five regular lines, and two other lines that did not seem regular. Sketching on the graph paper, he tried to construct a model of an atom that might emit harmonics of light. What kind of hot gas could glow in harmonics? “So I got a slight bit frustrated,” he would recall. “ ‘Look here, it is regular, isn’t it?’ I said to myself, as it were.”

  To satisfy himself that his lines were regular, he decided to check their spacings against the Balmer series of emission lines from glowing hydrogen—the most regularly spaced set of emission lines known in physics. The Balmer lines were spaced at decreasing intervals. He measured the intervals of the lines in his spectrum, compared them to the Balmer lines, and suddenly he understood. He was seeing Balmer lines in the radio star. He was seeing hot, glowing hydrogen in this radio star—except that the colors of hydrogen were pulled far down the spectrum, toward the red end. That would account for five of the lines—all regular. Now, what about the other two lines? If he moved these other two lines back up the scale to normal wavelengths, what would they be? He pulled out his circular slide rule and spun it. Magnesium. Oxygen.

  The radio star was made of normal elements. But it was receding from the earth at about 16 percent of the speed of light. This was a Doppler shift. The object was withdrawing in the general expansion of the universe—in the Hubble flow. This wasn’t any star—this was an extragalactic object. A 16 percent redshift would place it around two billion light-years away, among galaxies at the limit of the Hale Telescope’s imaging power—galaxies so faint that when he glanced at one in the mirror with averted vision, he wondered if he was seeing a will-o’-the-wisp. And this object was so bright it had twice burned up a plate.

  Schmidt, feeling unable to comprehend the enormity of his discovery, opened his door to let in a little air. At that moment Jesse Greenstein walked past. Maarten said, “Jesse, would you come in for a moment? I want to tell you something.”

  Jesse sat down. Maarten told him that he had found an extreme redshift in a radio star.

  Jesse’s face went pale. Jesse said, “Oh, my goodness!” A flash of something close to horror crossed his mind at that moment. In an instant Jesse saw that his theory of the radio stars was all wrong. He realized that he had seen a redshift in 3C 48! But he had rejected it. Instead he had convinced himself that the thing was a tiny star, drenched with curium, neptunium, and plutonium! He said, “We ought to look at 3C 48.”

  They dug up Jesse’s manuscript, and in a few moments Jesse announced that 3C 48 had a redshift of 37 percent. Jesse’s face went into an extreme redshift. He had already mailed his paper to the Astrophysical Journal.

  In Maarten’s words: “Our eyes were opened.”

  3C 48 was departing at more than one-third the speed of light. It would be five billion light-years away—and it was a brilliant point of light! Maarten and Jesse covered a blackboard with calculations. They could not believe what their eyes told them. They groped with chalk for a way to explain these emission lines without resorting to a redshift. They began shouting. The noise brought Bev Oke into Maarten’s office. Schmidt and Greenstein challenged Oke to disprove a redshift in these lines. He could not. Jesse telephoned the Astrophysical Journal and asked the editors to suppress his paper. (“It was a fascinating paper,” Jesse would say to me as he recalled these events years later. “Except that it was wrong.”) By 5:30 P.M., the universe had grown too strange to be contemplated without a drink. Jesse suggested that they go back to his house. When the three astronomers showed up looking for liquor, Jesse’s wife, Naomi, was flabbergasted. Caltech astronomers never went out drinking on Tuesday nights. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  Maarten could not sit on the couch. He walked up and down. If these things—which could no longer be called radio stars—were deep in the universe, then the light they shed equaled the thermal burning of an entire galaxy all at once!—yet crammed into a tiny area, as if s
ome force had crushed a hundred billion stars into a pinpoint and ignited it. And the jet! That jet coming out of 3C 273 looked like a blowtorch flame. The jet would be as long as three galaxies. It was horrible—what kind of force in nature could make a jet of gas three times bigger than a galaxy? “We acted so strange,” Maarten recalled. “We were shouting.” While Maarten seemed almost dismembered from nervousness, Jesse navigated through the wake of “that first terrible afternoon,” as he called it, with the help of Schimmelpenninck cigars (“The Apex of the Dutch Cigar Industry”) and Chivas Regal Scotch whisky. “Let me have some of that, too, please,” Maarten had said, pointing to the whisky. Looking back on it all now, Jesse says, “We had broken through a bubble in which we had been trapped. That is a deep feeling for a scientist. When you are working within a field and a discovery like this happens, the feeling is absolutely incommunicable; it’s organic.”

  Maarten drove home. For many hours that night in his living room, he has recalled, “I paced up and down like a caged tiger.” He was thirty-three years old.

  Corrie asked him what was wrong.

  He said, “Something terrible happened at the office today.” He told her that he had found an object among the most distant galaxies that burned with a terrifying light. He would have to publish. So little time, and what would he say about it? Walking around the living room, he asked himself, “Are you making a mountain out of an antheap? Or if not, what do you say? Boy, I will have to say something!” He wondered if he was overlooking some simple, innocent, rather ordinary explanation for these emission lines. What a fool he would make of himself if he published an article declaring that a bright star was two billion light-years away! “It all came clear, already, what the future held,” he would later say. “Because if you see very bright objects with such large redshifts, then somewhat fainter ones must have much bigger redshifts.” Maarten and Corrie put the children to bed, but Maarten could not sleep. They had recently bought their first television set. He switched it on and tried to watch a show. He realized that many more of these objects would soon be discovered. They would be fainter, of course, because they would be farther away. The next twenty-five years of his life stood in front of him as a straight road pointing into lookback time, and space opened before him into a gulf that sparkled with remote fires. To search for these things would be to probe down into time, almost into a different universe, and to watch a brutal, inexplicable drama occurring in an alien place. When he saw the test pattern on the television, he went to bed, asking himself, over and over again, Is there a way out?