They sit at computer screens.īut not only astronomers. These days, professional astronomers rarely look at the sky through the lens of a telescope. That information was then processed in data centers in New Mexico and Maryland and eventually landed on Professor Oesch’s computer screen in Geneva. A few exhausted photons of light from GNz-11 dropped on a photoelectric detector aboard a satellite orbiting Earth, produced a tiny electrical current that was translated into 0s and 1s, which were beamed to Earth in a radio wave. But consider the abstraction (thought I). Sure, they’re part of the universe, he said. Oesch answered that he looks at such distant smudges every day. Does this faint blob feel like part of nature, part of the same world of Keats and Goethe and Emerson, where “vines that round the thatch-eves run to bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees”? I asked Professor Oesch if he felt personally connected to this tiny smudge on his computer screen. That galaxy is so far away that its light had to travel for 13 billion years to get from there to here. Professor Oesch and his colleagues share the distinction of having discovered the most distant known object, a small galaxy called GNz-11. R ecently I met the astronomer Pascal Oesch, an assistant professor at the University of Geneva.
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