Conversations in Management
Scientists,
along with pilots who have just averted a potentially horrific
crash and firefighters who’ve pulled a child and puppy from a
burning building, tend to be taciturn and self-deprecating about
their achievements. They have a knack for discussing the
extraordinary as if it were worthy of only a yawn. That’s the
way Dr. Tinetti discussed the fact that her team at the European
Space Agency in Paris had discovered water on another planet.
The fact that they had discovered water molecules on a
planet 370,000,000,000,000 miles away seemed a mere detail. The
planet—affectionately known as HD 189733b—circles its sun in the
constellation Vulpecula roughly 64 light years away. Evidently
the planet is the size of Jupiter and has a surface temperature
of 1,700 degrees. That explains Dr. Tinetti’s plaintive hope
that we’ll find water on a more hospitable planet—not that any
of us will be visiting in the near future!
Dr. Tinetti’s incredible
discovery was made possible by an equally incredible piece of
equipment—the Spitzer Space Telescope. Launched in 2003, Spitzer
is the fourth of NASA’s orbiting observatories. It detects
infrared energy that’s largely blocked by the earth’s atmosphere
and by the vast clouds of dust and gas found throughout the
universe. In addition to water molecules on HD 189733b, Spitzer
has made some other startling discoveries. For example,
scientists had already identified HD 98800, a four-sun system
located 150,000,000 light years away in the TW Hydrae
constellation (who knew?), but with Spitzer, they are now
able to observe planetary development. Hypothesizing that
planets are formed snowball-like from tiny dust particles,
they’re watching the dust grains as they circle HD 98800
and literally become new worlds. (One NASA scientist
deadpanned that planets with multiple stars have “interesting”
sunsets.) Spitzer has also given astronomers a birds-eye view of
galaxies actually colliding with one another. While scanning
CL0958+4702—four galaxies 5,000,000,000 light years away—they
noticed a brilliant plume of light emanating from the group’s
center. Thanks to Spitzer, they learned that the plume was made
up of billions of stars being tossed aside as the
galaxies crashed together like bumper cars at an amusement park.
What’s more, the scale of this is nearly unimaginable. Three of
the colliding galaxies are comparable in size to our own Milky
Way while the fourth is three times larger!
Let’s face it, this is pretty
amazing stuff! Most of us have trouble finding our car keys
if they’re more than three feet away to say the least of finding
water molecules 370 trillion miles off. But as amazing as this
is, scientific achievement doesn’t get much airplay. When
we hear about these things at all, it’s usually as a quick aside
to the real news. That, of course, deals with islands
sinking in the Pacific, palm trees growing in Greenland,
terrifying crime sprees, rampant corporate corruption and the
pell-mell decline of western civilization in general. The bad
news is pervasive, overwhelming and emotionally numbing. Yet in
the midst of it all, men and women around the globe are doing
amazing things. They’re demonstrating extraordinary
ingenuity and displaying an inventiveness that pushes the
boundaries of our imagination. Dr. Tinetti, and thousands of
people like her, prove to us that dreams can become realities
and that the impossible can become routine. They show us that
the insurmountable can be overcome and that new wonders await us
when we take the time to find them. Colliding galaxies, new
worlds and water molecules in space! Amazing!
—Ebert
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