A Picture 13 Billion Years in the Making
A Short Story by Geoff Micks published June 26th, 2021.
The project was supposed to do for the James Webb Space Telescope what the Deep Field Image had achieved for the Hubble Telescope: Generate a mind-expanding image impossible to obtain any other way that persuaded the public at a glance of the value of the mission.
That’s what NASA’s PR team pitched the astronomers, anyway.
The astronomers of NASA, ESA, and CSA who made decisions about what to do with the $10-billion scientific instrument needed very little convincing to point their powerful new tool at the darkest part of the Cosmos just to see what they might find. Many of them had built their careers up to this moment with the express intention of doing exactly what the PR team was trying to persuade them to do.
The Hubble Deep Field was assembled from 342 different images in the near-ultraviolent, visible, and near-infrared spectrum taken over ten consecutive days.
The James Webb Deep Field —as the image was intended to be called before the obvious title presented itself— was made up of tens of thousands of images taken over almost two months in the long-wavelength visible spectrum all the way down to mid-infrared wavelengths where redshifted objects were too old and too distant to be observed any other way.
As the final image was being slowly and painstakingly assembled, the astronomers rejoiced to discover they were looking at an impossibly vast, warm, and almost evenly dispersed field of hydrogen gas. The Public Relations gurus despaired at what seemed to be a blank picture, but the astronomers assured them what they were seeing was amazing.
“We are looking further back in time than has ever been done before. This is the universe shortly after the Big Bang but before the first stars formed. We are looking at the absolute primordial of primordials here!” The scientists said variations of this over and over again to whoever would listen with half an ear and a glazed expression.
“I can’t explain that to normal people. Hubble Deep Field is full of ancient galaxies. People get that! This looks like we took a picture on a camera phone in a sauna with the lights off and the flash disabled,” was one example of the PR flacks’ ongoing complaints. Other versions were much more profane. No one wanted to be on the hot seat justifying the price tag of obtaining a picture of warm gas suspended in darkness.
As the data continued to be collected and processed, the astronomers discovered the ‘almost even’ dispersion of the hydrogen seemed to have patterned structure that scaled across what must have been an appreciable percentage of the entire then-still-small-but-rapidly-expanding universe all those billions of years ago.
“You have to find that intriguing?” The astronomers begged. “Before there was anything, there was texture to the fabric of the universe! How incredible is that? What could have caused it? Maybe the Big Bang had some kind of stutter where it happened unevenly? It might take us a century to figure this out. We are watching the birth of a whole new fundamental question of physics and cosmology!”
The collective yawns of the people who needed to showcase the James Webb Space Telescope to the world were metaphorically deafening. One woman went so far as to say, “If I wanted to get people excited by something like this, I would have stuck with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory folks. The LIGO team had simple diagrams and lasers built into their story. People like simple diagrams and lasers. Are you going to be able to give me some simple diagrams and lasers when I try to tell people totally dark gas in different densities is really cool?”
As some of the most powerful computers in the world crunched the data, a hypothesis was proposed that the picture emerging must reflect some kind of gravitational eddy or whirlpool, and sooner or later the James Webb Space Telescope would identify and get a picture of where the hydrogen piled up passed the tipping point into fusion. “It will be the first stars ever. Would that be acceptable for your PR purposes?” The astronomers asked through clenched teeth.
“Oh, you mean having a picture of something you can actually see? Yes, that would be a big first step towards acceptable, thank you,” was the strained reply coming from the Comms team whenever the promise of ‘The First Star Ever Born’ picture was raised.
Eventually that first star was found, or near enough. A stellar nursery the size of a small galaxy so bright the James Web Telescope was unable to focus on specifics was discovered, but by then no one was excited about that anymore.
The astronomers wandered through their offices in a daze at what they had found while looking for the point of first fusion.
As for the PR team? Their mood had transformed from bored to frightened of the bigger picture that had developed as the gas densities were studied in the search to pinpoint the first star creation. They were going to have to explain it to people, and they did not relish the prospect.
It was a coincidence.
Everyone was absolutely confident it was sheer coincidence.
The astronomers had been prepared to fight with the PR team on the subject, but they found no objections to the, ‘It’s just a coincidence’ angle. The Public Relations people —for all their bellyaching throughout the project— still had made their careers representing the work of scientists, and everyone understood coincidences do happen sometimes in science: In just the same way the Horsehead Nebula was not really a picture of a horse’s head, and the Sombrero Galaxy had nothing to do with a Mexican hat, what they were all seeing was just the mind conjuring up a pattern out of how the gas densities rose and fell.
And yet.
And yet if you were to take what should have been called the James Webb Deep Field, printed it out as a poster, hung it on a wall, and then walked any stranger off the street into the room, they would say in an instant the poster was unmistakably a picture of a hand snapping its fingers, and exactly where a spectral thumb met cosmic fingertips of slightly denser hydrogen stretching across the young universe, that point of friction is where the first stars were being born in an explosion of blinding bright white light that shone through the translucent matter of what billions of people would convince themselves could only be the divine hand of The Creator.
There was no escaping it. The picture was inevitably called, “Let There Be Light.”
To call the photo a sensation would be underselling it. It was iconic the instant it was made public. Within a day, everyone with a television or a computer or a smartphone had seen it. World leaders made speeches about it. Songs were written about it. Soon it became common for copies of the picture to hang in both public places and people’s homes. Of course the James Webb Space Telescope’s funding was immediately extended through another twenty years, and future space telescope projects named for the astronomers who had worked on the ‘Let There Be Light’ project sailed through Congress and the European Parliament for generations to come.
It was all a coincidence. Of course it was a coincidence. Every rational person agreed it was all just an amazing coincidence.
But you only had to look at “Let There Be Light” to see proof of the existence of God.
—
This is the second in a series of short stories I am going to write as I get myself back into the habit of writing regularly. You can find the first one here.
The inspiration for this story came from a redditor with the username u/EagleofMay. He or she proposed a writing prompt in a subreddit dedicated for that purpose. Here was the prompt in full:
“Theorists speculate that the universe was a dark place for the first few hundred million years, before the first stars and galaxies formed. Witnessing the moment when the universe was first bathed in starlight is a major quest in astronomy. Our observations indicate that cosmic dawn occurred between 250 and 350 million years after the beginning of the universe, and, at the time of their formation, galaxies such as the ones we studied would have been sufficiently luminous to be seen with the James Webb Space Telescope.” — Dr. Nicolas Laporte (University of Cambridge) . https://scitechdaily.com/witnessing-cosmic-dawn-250-million-to-350-million-years-after-the-beginning-of-the-universe/
When we see that first light being generated by the first stars we see something very unexpected: what is it?
Funnily enough, I posted a version of this story in the thread, but after a day it hadn’t received a single upvote, so I deleted it and posted it here instead. Anyway, I had fun with this in a different way than I normally do when writing. I don’t often get to do near-future content. I also liked dabbling in astronomy, a topic I find interesting to read but difficult to write about in my usual content.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. Stay tuned for more!
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