As a child, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was obsessed with the idea. I had a personal library of books on space, stars, planets, and countless diagrams of spacecrafts of the past and those that may come. I could recite the science behind theoretical concepts for interstellar propulsion, such as ion thrusters (which now exist) and the Bussard Ramjet. For a time, I even placed glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling, so I could look at Ursa Major and other celestial formations every night before I went to sleep.
On March 7, at the Lamar Bruni Vergara (LBV) Planetarium, that younger Matt awoke.
Marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s astronomical observations, the modern academic field, the LBV Planetarium hosted guest lecturer Don Winget, professor of astronomy at the University of Texas. Pen and paper in hand, I had been prepared for a discussion of concepts that had long-since faded from my immediate understanding. That, however, wasn’t what happened.
“Only four percent of the universe consists of what you and I can see,” explained Winget, going further to state that it’s made mostly of dark energy, which is causing and speeding up the universe’s expansion over time.
Winget also discussed the scale of the universe. Pretending that the sun was the size of an orange, he stated that the Earth would be the size of a pencil dot, and the nearest star to our sun would be all the way in Chicago.
He also talked about the scale of galaxies. Taking a piece of paper to represent our galaxy, Winget said the nearest galaxy to ours would, by scale, be as far away as a person sitting near you in the room.
The edge of the light-filled universe (known as the Horizon) would be, by scale, downtown at the Texas-Mexico Border. Perhaps the most attention-grabbing item in the lecture took place as Winget talked about white dwarf stars. A theory exists that as these dense bodies cool, their interiors crystallize. Because their cores are made of carbon, this would mean that they have diamond centers. Winget quipped that the old rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” had some truth to it when it referred to stars being like “diamonds in the sky.”
After the lecture concluded, many of us shuffled into the Planetarium to watch a short presentation.
To the tunes of Norah Jones and Josh Groban, we were whisked around the universe, from the Orion Nebula to the Pleiades star cluster in the Taurus constellation. From that perspective, our sun, Sol, became tiny and soon lost in the multitude. It exists on the edge of one spiral arm far from the galactic core, one of 200 billion stars in just one of the many galaxies out there. From this vantage point, it becomes obvious how tiny the dominion of Man really is.
TAMIU currently lacks a major or minor in astronomy, but events such as this could go a long way into coaxing greater interest on our campus in the stars and realms beyond our world. Even as a political science major set to graduate soon, I was made to ask myself why I ever put those childhood dreams of mine aside.