On Election Night, Stare Into the Abyss

Lately, I’ve developed an unhealthy fixation on the presidential election. Maybe you have too. The New York Times needle hasn’t started twitching yet, but for weeks now, I’ve had this full-body fourth-quarter feeling, and an impulse to speculate endlessly about people’s shifting moods in swing states. We are told that this race ranks among the closest in American history. I just want to know who will win. Nothing else seems to exist.

Today, while we wait for the networks to start calling states, I’m trying to zoom out, to remind myself that there is a cosmos beyond Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This is not too difficult, once you work up the necessary resolve. Whatever cruelties plague our current historical era (and there are many), we do have cameras that can see across the universe, and anyone with a decent internet connection can freely peruse the snapshots that they’ve taken. I keep the photo archive for the James Webb Space Telescope, the farthest-seeing of them all, in my bookmarks bar. When I find myself a bit too immersed in the political news cycle, I click through the latest releases.

The image at the top of this page was posted in late October, and for me, it was an instant favorite. I love its rendered colors—the shock pink, pale chartreuse, and lightsaber blue. I love the three-dimensionality, the way your eye is drawn through torn veils of orange and red in the foreground into a glowing inner sanctum. I love the distant galaxies scattered across the frame, their shapes and orientations, the mind-shredding thought that together they contain many trillions of planets.

I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to experience these images purely on this level, as beautiful splatters of light. Sometimes it’s nice to gawk at a dark and sparkling expanse without any talk of metallicity or ionized gas. But last week, I was in the mood to follow any stray curiosity, so long as it did not relate directly to the election. I wanted to know what was happening in this image.

To capture it, the Webb telescope was pointed beyond the Milky Way’s edge, at one of its satellites, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers sometimes take on a bullying tone when talking about the Small Magellanic Cloud. They use diminutive terms. They refer to it as a dwarf and point out that it contains  only a few billion stars, at most, instead of hundreds of billions. But they are grateful that it was ensnared by the Milky Way’s gravitational heft, because it serves as a time capsule. The conditions inside it are similar to those that were common throughout the universe 5 billion years ago, eons closer to when star formation was at its peak. The Small Magellanic Cloud provides a vision of the cosmos as it was during a more generative period.

There are other ways of seeing what things were like back then: Astronomers can point cameras directly at galaxies that are 5 billion light-years distant and capture light that left them 5 billion years ago. But because those galaxies are so far away, the pictures end up blurry. You can’t make out single stars. That’s why it’s such a windfall to have the Small Magellanic Cloud right in our backyard.

The Webb telescope trained its awesome eye on it for 14 hours total, spread across three months. Its infrared sensors were able to peer past large clouds of dust and gas to capture a grand spectacle of creation, a cluster of blue stars erupting into being. You can see the cluster, just left of center. About 2 million years ago—yesterday, on cosmic timescales—the largest star’s thermonuclear core ignited. It quickly grew to a fearsome size, 40 times as massive as the sun. The blue stars near it ignited around the same time. Ultraviolet shock waves cascaded outward from each one, creating bubbles of light that overlapped across an enormous volume of space.

The new stars are still burning bright, but astronomers don’t expect any of them to last more than 10 million years. That makes them flashbulbs compared with our 10-billion-year sun. But even short-lived stars can set great chain reactions into motion. We can see one unfolding in this image. Fierce stellar winds are gusting out of the stars, compressing surrounding pockets of gas that are themselves now igniting. They’re the little bright spots dotting the innermost fringes of the red and orange veils.

I texted Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which oversees not only the James Webb Space Telescope, but also many of America’s other flagship observatories. To do his job, Mountain has to think about many different kinds of light. I wanted to know what struck him most about the image. He said that it made him wonder what it would have been like to gaze at the whole universe with infrared eyes, 5 billion years ago. Back then, the cosmos hadn’t yet expanded to the degree that it has now. Galaxies would have been closer together. In every direction, a violent and creative process would have been unfolding.

I’m not here to peddle cosmic escapism. I won’t pretend that because the universe is so grand and so big and so old, human affairs are of little consequence. People are important. Across the whole cosmos, we don’t yet know of anyone else who builds space telescopes. Our elections have meaning, even if their consequences don’t extend for light-years. These celestial vistas don’t diminish any of that, but they can offer some respite, especially this evening. If you need to stare into an abyss, it might as well be beautiful.