Yesterday afternoon, all at once, my son and I started to feel a little sluggish. For me, a little afternoon slump isn’t so surprising. But for a kid who’s usually climbing up doorjambs, ripping off pull-ups, or teaching himself how to do a corkscrew flip on the trampoline, it’s weird. But there we were in the climbing gym (see above) and he jumped off the wall and stumbled over to me looking a little shocked. “I’m tired,” he said.
It wasn’t until we got outside and looked up at the clouds that we figured out what might have happened. All day, there had been beautiful formations that looked like fish scales and now, the clouds had reformed into the rounded bumps that one of my kids’ teachers had called “rain blossoms.” (They’re more technically called mammatus clouds.) I checked the weather: the next day, there was a 20 percent chance of thunderstorms.
Rapid changes in atmospheric pressure, whether climbing to mountain peaks or diving into the deep, are known to affect the body. There are names for the sorts of discomfort—altitude sickness, the bends–which can sometimes be severe, even fatal. But even at sea level, the falling barometric pressure before a storm may bring on other changes in internal weather.
A couple of weeks ago, during a backpacking trip in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, Elise and I shared our campsite with a short-tailed weasel. He, or she, was lithe and frolicsome, darting over rocks and flowing around the trunks of lodgepoles in relentless pursuit of squirrels. Weasels have a sort of split reputation — they are, in our imaginations, both furtive and ferocious, rarely glimpsed yet hellaciously brave; you might call them Terror Hermits. This one seemed to embody that duality: He scurried through our site almost too rapidly and liquidly for our eyes to track, but periodically settled atop boulders and stared at us, head lifted and cocked, with total fearlessness. When I followed him to the crevice that appeared to be his den, he poked out his head with what struck me as cheerful curiosity. Rarely have I stared into such a frank, inquisitive animal face — surely the last visage that many a pika, bird, and chipmunk ever saw.
Since thiswas first published in August 17, 2012, Beth Willman’s galaxy has probably been identified as an ultra faint dwarf galaxy; it possibly has been found to hold a entity violent enough to send out xrays, which may or many not be a “low mass xray binary,” which may or may not be an unlucky star caught in the gravitational field of a black hole or neutron star which is tearing it apart and releasing xrays. And Beth Willman herself has moved on from being a mere post-doc to a high position in the upper executive reaches of the upcoming game-changing enormous LSST survey at the Rubin Observatory — which goes to show you should just get yourself a galaxy.
She does. Actually, it’s not much of a galaxy, it’s more of a sub-galaxy, a dwarf galaxy, or maybe not even any kind of galaxy at all, maybe just a cluster of stars. It’s hers because she found it, hanging around the edges of the Milky Way. That’s it, above. If you look with the eye of love, you can see in the left-middle what she calls a “slight overdensity” of dim blue stars. It’s named Willman 1.
Beth Willman is now a member of the astronomy faculty at Haverford College. When she found Willman 1, though, she was a postdoc at NYU (astronomers have long childhoods that don’t end with a doctoral degree) and not particularly interested in galaxies. She was interested in cold dark matter, invisible stuff with no other name, smallish clumps of which were predicted to exist nearby in the tens of thousands, and of which astronomers had found only tens. So she was looking, she said, “for the nothing that was there” and so far she hadn’t been seeing it; in fact her doctoral dissertation was about her non-detection of nothing.
You find this nothing, this clump of cold dark matter, because it’s full of shining little tracer particles, sprinklings of regular matter that have turned into stars. So now as a postdoc and in spite of not caring about galaxies, she was looking, she said “for galaxies that might have been detected if they’d been there.” She’d log in to the enormous database gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey—astronomy these days is rarely done with a telescope—and get back lists of numbers corresponding to the positions, colors, and brightnesses of millions of stars.
Then she’d also ask the database for actual images. In one of them, she thought she saw some small blue overdensity. She checked what she saw with a colleague, Mike Blanton, and he saw it too. In the next office was a particle physicist named Neal, so they called him over and said, “Neal, do you see anything here?” and Neal pointed to the overdensity and said, “That something there?” “If even a particle physicist could see it,” Beth Willman thought, “it must be there.” Then she thought, “Now I’ve got to go to a telescope.”
As it happened, she didn’t. Telescopes take effort: you apply for time far in advance that you might or might not get; you leave home and live on some mountain for however long it takes; you sleep all day, work all night; if the weather’s bad, that’s it, you’re out; and astronomers love it. Instead a colleague had time at the Apache Point Observatory’s 3.5 meter and a deeper image showing more stars, meaning that the overdensity was real. She published a paper called “A New Milky Way Companion.”
Officially it was called SDSS-1049+5103, the numbers being its position on the sky in right ascension and declination, plus the survey name—a naming protocol that even astronomers feel is lame. Luckily again, a more experienced NYU astronomer named David Hogg advised her that the press release would look better if her overdensity were named Willman 1 and also her parents would like it. Then other colleagues picked up the name and it stuck.
She didn’t know exactly what Willman 1 was, whether it was a star cluster or a dwarf galaxy, and she still doesn’t but she’s pretty sure it’s a dwarf. It’s about 75 light years across, 100,000 light years away. “It looks like the Milky Way is disturbing it,” she says. “It’s moving away but not very fast,” meaning it’s feeling the Milky Way’s gravitational field and it will get just so far before it turns and boomerangs back. In the image above—”NOT a great image,” she says, “but it does show reality”—in which the “streaky crud” is two satellites, the big red halo things are bright stars, most of the rest of the tiny points are stars, and the soft small blue halo things are whole galaxies. Willman 1 was the faintest dwarf anyone had seen, by orders of magnitude. That was in 2005, and asked to put money on it, she would have said it was just something weird.
But then she found another ultra faint dwarf, called Ursa Major 1, and a colleague found another one called Bootes 2, and other people found still other ones; and around the corner at the end of this decade is a splendidly gigantic new sky survey that should hold many, many more; and now Beth Willman and her colleagues wonder whether they’ve seen only the tip, whether—all the majestic giant spirals and ellipticals aside—these little dwarfs are the universe’s most numerous galaxies. And the astronomers don’t want a yes or no answer, they want to know how galaxies form in their nests of dark matter, and what sizes dark matter clumps come in and how they’re distributed throughout the universe. “Over the next decade,” she says, “we’re going to learn a lot about something.”
Beth Willman says that she and Wil 1 have a love-hate relationship. Willman 1 gave her “great name recognition,” she says, and in this cut-throat field, helped her get the Haverford job. And she loves the nearly-invisible, modest ultra faint dwarf, so small and hopeful. She loves its little number of brothers, she loves that other Wil 1’s are out there, she loves that the universe holds “such unusual and puzzling things.”
But Wil 1 is frustrating. Colleagues who didn’t know the history scolded her for naming it after herself. And like most scientists, she takes care with certainty: though she thinks it’s a dwarf, she’s cautious about calling it one; nor is she 100 percent sure which stars belong to it and which to the Milky Way; and something about the arrangement of its stars and velocities is odd. In spite of not knowing everything she wants to know about it, she says, “it also feels weird studying an object named after me, so I have no intention of writing a paper about this object again.” But if astronomers understand anything about the universe, it’s that they can’t imagine the extent to which all the things they can’t imagine are possible, so she adds, “But who knows.”
The cicadas started scaling dense soil while I was in another state, hundreds of miles away from home, a hundred times farther than they’d ever travel. I returned to hollow husks, split along the back seam like a boy grown too fast for his new shirt. These exuvia are all the same brown color, light and shiny like parchment paper. They’re all fearsome, claws at the top of their three pairs of limbs, large round orbs for the eyes. A creature you’d never want to meet in a size larger than a human thumb. Even in their diminutive form, it’s easy to reach for terror in lieu of wonder. All those hollow, unhallowed shells crusting tree trunks and grass blades and park benches. Isn’t this how horror films start?
I made it home in time to watch one finish tugging itself free of its fifth instar, the final form of its subterranean nymph body. Fresh wings partially inflated with lymph, red eyes, pale body with two black spots behind its eyes. Within a day the whole body will be black, the wings outlined in umber, their translucence solidifying from the texture of tissue paper to the crisp firmness of film. The claws are gone, the red eyes endearing. The mature Magicicada does not make me think of monsters.
Sunday morning. Early for a Sunday morning, which is to say not that early. Maybe 8 a.m. A crowd of gulls and terns stood along this sandy Delaware beach. When my friend and I walked past they took off, as expected, and returned to what seemed to be the main activity of the morning: fishing. We watched them hover and splash.
A raptor that I think was a bald eagle flew off over the land, pursued by a smaller bird. An osprey crossed over. A tern careened in circles with a prize in its mouth as another chased after it, screeching.
On our return walk, we found the above picture: what they were fishing, I assume. A perfect silvery iridescent specimen, half-eaten, although I assume someone took care of the other half before long. Predation at work, the species living out their drama within sight of the crystal-palace vacation homes that line the Delaware shore, the birds continuing to make a living; the fish meeting their ends.
The round things in this picture of clear water aren’t rocks. They are little balls of algae tumbling around the bottom of the Adriatic sea off the Croatian coast. Occasionally they float to the surface of the water.
Looking at these little balls is likely having a very different effect on you than it had on me. When I saw them I ran around the beach barking for my camera, because I think they might be marimos, and marimos have no business being here. My problem is that I have the marimo brain virus. You may have it too by the end of this post, so if you don’t want to get obsessed with strange algal life forms and start embarrassing yourself at beaches, consider switching to a different tab.
My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych 101: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These five were originally proposed by Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and while they were derived unscientifically and are clearly massively oversimplified, I have found truth in them. As my father was declining, I’d first denied his trajectory by posing unrealistic plans that required him to have a future (e.g., turning my husband’s workshop into a little apartment for dad, never mind all the nursing care he required). I experienced deep anger at people who didn’t see worth in healing his various ailments, and I begged any higher power who was listening to keep him whole until I could find solutions to unsolvable problems. Eventually, I sat in darkness knowing there was nothing I could do to adjust his heading. I slid in and out of each of these feelings, in various orders, numerous times as he lay dying. By the end, acceptance was all that was left.
