First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe Read Online Free PDF Page B

not take much part in the conversation. Carolyn Shoemaker had gray hair, cut in bangs, and brown eyes. She wore a maroon sweatshirt and blue jeans. Her husband, Eugene Shoemaker, had a broad face, salt-and-pepper hair, and a clipped mustache. They were a handsome couple. One would imagine them to be normal grandparents, if one did not know that they spent a good deal of their time roaming the Australian outback looking for giant, eroded craters left by asteroids and comets that had smashed into the earth. Gene said, “We’re having all kinds of trouble with our telescope.” He was referring to the eighteen-inch Palomar Schmidt Telescope, which stood in a small dome three hundred yards south of the Hale Telescope.
    “It’s an
old
telescope,” Carolyn said with affection.
    “One of the guide motors has been stalling on us,” Gene said. “I think the motor’s brushes are shot.” He and Carolyn were on Palomar Mountain to search for asteroids and comets.
    Carolyn said, “Gene has to dive under the telescope and start the motor by hand, before the photograph smears.”
    “I have to move fast,” Gene said. “I have to grab it around the driveshaft and give it a spin.”
    Jim Gunn and Barbara Zimmerman walked in. They sat down and nodded to everyone, and Gunn dragged a steak onto his plate with a fork.
    “That’s not all of it,” Gene Shoemaker went on. “We’ve got some kind of backlash in the main gear. The telescope is jumping all over the place. We can’t hold it on a star.”
    Jim Gunn said, “It sounds like the gears are worn, Gene.”
    “Exactly,” Gene said.
    “There’s the problem,” Jim said. “The gears need a weight on them.”
    “Exactly,” Gene said.
    “Get some rope and a two-by-four,” Jim said. “Lash the two-by-four to the telescope. Then hang a piece of
lead
on it.”
    Everyone laughed, including Gene Shoemaker. He saw that Gunn actually had a point there, and he reminded himself to bring some pieces of lead with him the next time he and Carolyn visited Palomar Mountain.

    There is a saying among astronomers that five billion people concern themselves with the surface of the earth, and ten thousand with everything else. These people are the practitioners of what is said to be the world’s oldest science. The astronomers conduct their craft from the vantage point of a droplet of iron and silicates orbiting a G2 star that is now drifting at the inner edge of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing approximately one hundred billion suns. If the Milky Way has other names, the astronomers do not know them yet. They have made
some
progress in the twentieth century, having learned that the Milky Way is a member of what they call the Local Group. The Local Group is a clump of several dozen galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy and the Clouds of Magellan, that together constitute a virtually unnoticeable knot of galaxies near the outskirts of the Local Supercluster, which is a cloud of manythousands of galaxies. If a galaxy were a leaf, then a supercluster would be the size of a tree. The Local Supercluster amounts to about one-millionth of the observable universe, which throngs with superclusters in the way that a forest is populated with trees. In the more distant parts of the astronomers’ universe—as they see it—the brilliant lights called quasars gleam with a physical power that transcends any forces the astronomers have noticed anywhere near the earth. The astronomers do not fully understand quasars—what they are or how they burn—although many quasars are bright enough to be seen with a modest amateur telescope.
    Maarten Schmidt hardly touched his dinner. He seemed preoccupied. There was a smell of coffee in the air.
    Barbara Zimmerman said to Maarten Schmidt, “I think we’ve gotten Jim’s little box going.”
    Maarten tapped his fingers on the table and turned to Jim. “Well, James, what next?”
    “Keep working, I guess,” Gunn