The Universes through the Keyhole

[Not just any old astronomical photograph. (Click to enlarge.) See
the note at the foot of this post for more info.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Fall

Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season
Changes its tense in the long-haired maples
That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves
Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition
With the final remaining cardinals) and then
Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last
Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground.
At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees
In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager
And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever
Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun
Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance,
A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud
Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything
Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s
Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision, one moment
Pulling out of the station according to schedule,
Another moment arriving on the next platform. It
Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away
From their branches and gather slowly at our feet,
Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving
Around us even as its colorful weather moves us,
Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets.
And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

(Edward Hirsch [source])

…and:

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think… The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul.

(David Foster Wallace [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Palindrome

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other…. Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American

Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am
putting on. It is evening in the antiworld
where she lives. She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which spit her out
into pain, impossible at first, later easing,
going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.
Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,
her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,
but their ardor increases. Soon her second child
will be young enough to fight its way into her
body and change its life to monkey to frog to
tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to
nothing. She is making a list:
Things I will need in the past
lipstick
shampoo
transistor radio
Sergeant Pepper
acne cream
five-year diary with a lock
She is eager, having heard about adolescent love
and the freedom of children. She wants to read
Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick. I think of her as she will
be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the
mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,
her other to open a jar. By now our lives should
have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have
passed one another like going and coming trains,
with both of us looking the other way.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

About the photograph: This is actually a composite photograph — two thousand separate images of the same area of sky — taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. (If you add up the total exposure time of all those images, this is approximately a two-million-second exposure: twenty-three days.) The image is called the Extreme Deep Field, or XDF.

So what’s so remarkable about it? Two things struck me right away:

First, this is a really, really small area of the sky. How small? The photo at the right should give you an idea. (The Moon has been added to that image to provide a sense of scale.) See that very faint little rectangle standing on one corner about in the center? Yeah. That. Like the post title says: through the keyhole. The tiny, tiny keyhole.

(If you can’t see it, by the way, that’s because of this reduced-size version of the real photo. If you click to enlarge it, you should be able to see the rectangle more clearly.)

The other remarkable thing about it: all those dots aren’t stars. They’re galaxies. Each galaxy contains (cue Carl Sagan impressionists) millions and billions of stars. In the original image — again, in that tiny little area of the sky — over five thousand galaxies are visible. (Sorry, italics should almost be the default font posture for this note, hmm?)

So, already my mind was sort of stretched out of whack. But then I started to learn and think about the distances and time scales involved…

The universe, they estimate, is around 13.5 to 14 billion years old. The most distant galaxy visible in the XDF is about 13 billion light-years away, that is, it’s taken that mote of light that many years to reach our eyes. I looked back at the photo immediately above, of the scale of the XDF, and noticed that it’s actually in a fairly dark patch of sky. These galaxies are not only far, far, far away from us. They’re gigantic distances from one another. And again, those are “just” galaxies. The closest star to us in the Milky Way is about four light years away, and heck, it took the most recent Mars rover around eight or nine months just to get to that planet, at a tiny fraction of the speed of light… and the earliest dinosaurs (the usual Earthly point of reference for “deep past”) appeared less than a quarter of a billion years ago…

(I’m sorry, but wow. Just one big inarticulate wow. Yes, an italicized, small-caps wow.)

Anyway, all of a sudden this got me thinking… You know the song “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” right? Written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, published in 1932? Biggest hit version recorded by Linda Scott, in 1961? What? NO?!? Okay, here:

[Below, click Play button to begin I’ve Told Every Little Star. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:18 long.]

[Lyrics]

So let’s suppose that Linda Scott really had told every little star — just in the area covered by the XDF photo. Let’s suppose, conservatively, that each of those 5,500 galaxies contained a million stars. Let’s suppose, further, that in reporting her love to every little star, she used the words I think he is so sweet. This takes about 2-3 seconds to say, call it 3 seconds to give her time to catch her breath as she moves from star to star. Let’s see… 2.5 seconds times 5,500 galaxies @ 1,000,000 stars… umm… 5,500,000,000 stars total, times 3, carry the 1…

Jeezus holy cats: 16,500,000,000 seconds.

Got that, Linda? It took you 522+ freaking years to tell every little star. Sez Wikipedia, you must’ve started professing your love around the same time Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. And never, ever took a bathroom break.

No wonder she hasn’t yet bothered to tell the insensitive clod she’s singing to. Where the hell was he for the past five centuries?!?

_____________________

Update, Sunday 2012-09-30: I neglected to tip my hat (once I caught up to it) to the Bad Astronomy blog for alerting me to the XDF photo. Thanks, BA (and Dr. Phil Plait)!