When I was in 8th grade – I think it was 8th grade – we had to do some public speaking. One of our speeches had to be an explanation of something, and I chose to explain the layout of the streets of Washington, D.C.
Today, I can’t imagine how I went on for multiple minutes about this, even figuring in the time to mess with the opaque projector. It is a neat layout – there are four quadrants, centered on the U.S. Capitol, so you can find the intersection of 7th and E Streets, say, at four different locations in the city. Numbers run north-south, letters and words run east-west, states cut diagonally across the grid.
I’ve always loved maps. I found all of this beautifully logical and fascinating enough to explain to my classmates.
I was thinking about that speech recently because I’ve been redrawing my own mental map of D.C. I’ve lived around here for most of my life. And for most of that time, I’ve gotten around the city on public transportation. So my mental map of my hometown grew as blobs around Metro stations—blobs that spread and ran into each other, sometimes in ways that surprised me. I added layers onto the maps as buildings were built and demolished, businesses opened and closed again. Jobs added details and depth to particular neighborhoods.
But now I find myself driving around the city. My mom stopped driving years ago. When my dad died in November, my mom gave me the car. I spent the next seven months driving back and forth to her house in the suburbs. At the same time that I was shifting my travels from the sidewalk to the roadway, I was shifting my life from my own apartment close to the Maryland border to my partner’s house, a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol building.
All that driving brings new connections to my map. One evening this spring I was driving through the boring part of town, northwest of the White House. A plain grid, all the buildings the same height, shiny metal and glass. The street looked just like all the others around there. But as I waited at a red light, I realized I was a block and a half west of the job I’d had from 2007 to 2008. I’d stood at that corner countless times on the way to lunch. That Malaysian place was half a block to the left. And that strip club.
Call no man happy until he is dead. The phrase is a bit like an optical illusion: its meaning depends on the psychological topography of the person who is looking at the words. Some people see: “Life is suffering that only ends when you are dead”. Others see: “Even if things are good now, the next calamity could always be just around the corner”.
I was thinking about this ambiguity when I was at a funeral a couple of months ago. The officiant gave a narrative of her life that was as pruned and artificial as a Bonsai tree. It was also the last word: there was no more experience ahead for her, no more data points to plot into adjusted conclusions. After he was done, we all sat in silence in the little chapel, looking back on her life.
Time is hard to think about. Beyond the immediate present and past, its sheer abstractness means the concept oozes from our grasp. I just wrote “grasp” because the physical metaphor is all I have to hold the concept of time in any focus.
That temptation seems to be universal. Most cultures don’t know how to talk about time without resorting to spatial metaphors. It’s why we think of the future as being in front of us and the past as something we have put behind us. As the anthropologist Chris Sinha once wrote in New Scientist:
Space and time seem to be closely related domains of human cognition, if the way we talk about them is a reliable guide. We speak of events occurring in relation to temporal landmarks, in the same way that we locate objects in relation to spatial landmarks. So an event can take place in the summer or on Friday.
My dear friend “P” is a bit of a nut. She’s always doing a million things at once. The piles on her dining-room table are epic. At least two laptops are open with projects in progress at any one time. It’s fair to say she over-commits to the point of madness: She is the leader of this or that task force, the head of this or that committee, the presenter at the meeting, the person who can’t say no. Her fridge and freezer say it all, overstuffed with ideas (maybe she’ll start using tahini!) and options (mocha creamer, skim milk, 2% milk, oat milk, heavy cream…take your pick).
Oh, did I mention she has multiple degrees (including a veterinary one…yeah, she’s a smart cookie), a full-time high-security-clearance job, two fostered teens whom she wrangled from an unsafe household (!), aging parents with lots of questions, and seven “special needs” (and often just plain noisy) rescue dogs? When I’m at her house, I am immersed in my favorite kind of chaos—the kind that’s not my own.
Here’s a picture of something I found and put in my mouth. You get to guess what it is. The season for these where I live is just getting going, and this first ran four years ago, so it’s about time to show it again.
First, is it organic or manufactured? Don’t scroll down to see the pen for scale. Let your imagination wander. It looks marine to me, like an anemone bed, little feelers reaching up. Or the bristles of a scrubbing device made of plastic, which I can’t imagine eating.
Hint, it is the underside of something I found growing in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado around 10,000 feet in elevation. After a spate of excellent rains, all sorts of oddities have been springing and oozing from the ground. When I found this one, I cut it off with a knife, took it home, cooked it, and ate it.
It was good, a bit woody in flavor, like aged and slightly bitter beef.
It was a warm July evening, and we left the living room window open so the cats could lounge in the screened in porch. As usual, my teenage son went to bed around midnight, hours after I had turned in.
At 1:30am I heard a frantic chittering noise from behind his closed door. He was calling out from under his covers while a panicked bat circled above, looking for a way out of the small room.
Son safely out, window open, bat perching on the window frame looking beady-eyed but adorable, we closed the room off to let the bat find its way out overnight. That’s when the rabies-related googling began, and I started on some dodgy, middle-of-the-night statistical reasoning.
Let me share what I learned: If a child is sleeping in a room where a bat is found, you are to consider that they may have been bitten or scratched. That’s what the 24-hour nursing service and the local public health page said. However, there was no indication of contact—no bite marks or memory of a touch. On the other hand, the bat’s sudden distress might have been caused by an encounter. In other words, it was very hard to tell whether I was worrying about a complete non-event.
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.”
