Ann K. Finkbeiner - A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering In A New Era of Discovery

ALSO BY ANN FINKBEINER

After the Death of a Child: Living with Loss Through the Years
The Jasons: The Secret History of Sciences Postwar Elite

Free Press

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2010 by Ann Finkbeiner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Free Press hardcover edition August 2010

FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,
please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or
business@simonandschuster.com.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
www.simonspeakers.com.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Finkbeiner, Ann K.

A grand and bold thing: an extraordinary new map of the universe ushering in a new era of discovery / Ann Finkbeiner.1st Free Press hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Three-dimensional imaging in astronomy. 2. Astronomical spectroscopy.
3. AstronomyCharts, diagrams, etc.Data processing. 4. Astronomical instrumentsTechnological innovations. 5. GalaxiesObservations.
6. QuasarsObservations. 7. Gunn, J. E. (James Edward), 1938 I. Title.

QB465.F56 2010

520.22'3dc22

2010008533

ISBN 978-1-4165-5216-1

ISBN 978-1-4391-9647-2 (ebook)

For Papa and T.C.,
with all my love

The Instrument Fairy

And what do you want to do with the new telescopes? I asked Wallace Sargent, whos a Caltech astronomer. Thats a boring question, he said, and the answer is so boring I wont answer it. Its like youre a Victorian explorer looking for the source of the Nile and when you run across the Pyramids, if you had any sense at all, youd investigate them. Pardon the expression, but I point the fucking telescope at the sky and see whats out there.

interview with Wallace Sargent, 1991

THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPES first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescopes political shepherd, John Bahcall, found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomersJill Knapp, Don Schneider, and particularly Jim Gunnand since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescopes perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescopes principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirrors shape, the telescope couldnt focus, the problem was irrevocable.

Jim and Bahcall did most of the talking. Why hadnt the astronomers overseeing the NASA contractors caught the mistake? It was a dumb mistake, a beginners textbook mistake. Nor did they think that astronauts could change out the mirror on a telescope in orbit nearly 400 miles up. Could they themselves come up with any brilliant ideas? Not at the moment. Certainly any kind of repair would take years, money, and a lot more effort, and they both had already dumped their lives and careers into it. Don Schneider, who had been Jims graduate student and was now working with Bahcall, sat there feeling overwhelmed. Jill Knapp, who was married to Jim, mostly listened. Dinners with Bahcall always started early, so they all went home early too.

Jim Gunn had gotten involved with the planning for the Hubble Space Telescope fifteen years before, when he was thirty-eight years old and a full professor at Caltech. His own reason was that he and most other cosmologiststhose astronomers who study the origin and evolution of the universecould use the telescope to find out how the universe would end. Immediately after the Big Bang, the explosion that began it all, the new universe had begun expanding, and now, thirteen-plus billion years later, it was still expanding. No one knew how fast it was expanding because that depended on how much matter was in it, and they didnt know the amount of matter because at least 90 percent of it was invisible; they called it dark matter. Enough of any kind of matter, and its mutual gravitation would make the universe eventually slow, stop, reverse direction, and collapse in on itself. Not enough matter, and the universe would just get more rarefied and expand forever. The amount of matter in the universe and the rate of expansion so preoccupied cosmologists they went around saying that all cosmology was just the search for two numbers.

At the same time, Jim happened to be fixed on a newly invented light detector called a charge-coupled device, or CCD, which takes light and turns it into digital information. CCDs are unusually sensitive. In fact, they were thirty times more sensitive than the light detector that Jim knew was planned for the Hubble Space Telescopes main camera. So in October of 1976, Jim had walked into the office of his friend and colleague Jim Westphal in Caltechs South Mudd building and said, Jim, we have to build the camera for the space telescope. A CCD camera on a space telescope would be sensitive enough to find cosmologists two numbers.

But building a camera for the Hubble Space Telescope meant working through NASA, and for Westphal and Gunn, the prospect was unappealing. The NASA style is corporate, takes decades, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and operates on systems engineering principles, one of which is to do things only well enough to get them done. This is the polar opposite of astronomers style, which is iconoclastic, takes months to years, is as cheap as possible, and operates on the principle of Westphal and Gunn in the basement with soldering irons doing things right, period.

So back in South Mudd, Westphal told Gunn he wanted to have nothing to do with NASA. But Gunn, gripped by a vision of sensitive electronics, went to the blackboard and wrote the equations that showed how CCDs in space meant seeing better by a factor of one hundred. Westphal wasnt convinced: Jim, no way, he said. Well build some nifty thing and the damned thing will have a bad solder joint in it someplace and we wont be able to reach up there and fix it, and itll drive both of us into the booby house.

Gunn became eloquent: If we dont do it, were going to be out of business in astronomy, in serious astronomy, the forefront of astronomy, on the ground, in five years. So for the next ten years, Gunn, Westphal, a team of astronomers, and a large team of NASA contractors built what came to be called the Wide Field and Planetary Camera, or WFPC, pronounced wiffpick. Astronomers said that WFPC would make the whole space telescope worthwhile.