Ce rayon désolé: GRB 090423
Getting some awesome birthday presents, such as a trumpet player practicing Norwegian Wood under the Soquel Street bridge near San Lorenzo Park this afternoon. A first edition of VDLA's L'amour supreme, the gift of which boggles my mind. My sister singing into my answering machine this morning. And then there's this:
NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.
The traces of the star they found indicate that "the progenitor star appears to belong to the second or third generation of stars, rather than the first generation." We've come a long way since Edison's tasimeter.
Astronomers were in the right place at the right time to witness and capture this event thanks to the text message they received from NASA's Swift satellite: astronomer flash-mob ftw! I would love it if this somehow got worked into an episode of The Big Bang Theory.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.
Research into gamma-ray bursts like this one "...brings us close to that magical point of first light," says Volker Bromm, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. "We don't have to get much farther to catch the earliest stars."
The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope is also in the news, having just released a video of its first year of imaging gamma-ray activity. It's kind of beautiful, and mundane, and not at all what popular astronomy of the late 19th C imagined would be captured: the history of everything that has ever happened, somehow inscribed on the arriving light in a way yet to be deciphered (most certainly decipherable at some point).
Neato, huh? Anyway, back to GRB 090423.
The comment thread on Discover's 80beats blog raises an interesting question regarding the calculation of the event's age and location: what about inflation magnitude? Someone else on another blog asks a similar question: how are these calculations correct if that inflation rate "would put this object moving away from us at beyond the speed of light after it was 4 to 6 billion years old"? What is the speed of space, as it were?
This thread over at physicsforums.com gives something of an answer (that the question is nonsense, since "expansion of space" is a "property of a particular coordinate system" and not a force) (I don't understand it either). It has something to do with scalar systems, local vs global, the former being one in which we can look back 13 billion years and see this star's death, still within our cosmological horizon, the latter being one without horizon, one of eternal inflation. Apparently this question confuses laypeople and physicists alike, and I won't get close to untangling it in this post, but I found this particular partial answer quite consonant with the cosmological imaginary of Villiers's moment:
"...when when space does expand at this rate [at the speed of light], none of the force carriers from any particle will be able to reach another particle: no gravity, no light, no atoms, just lonely particles."
This is of course the central image of ch 5, Villiers's imagining of the extremes of time and space communicating with each other, an imagining that has an emotional tenor to which we still seem to be subject, as evidenced by that comment on Science Now's blog:
Before, long before the Earth was even part of a nebula, stars were shining, as they had shone for a sort of eternity; but alas!, so far from the earth that their radiant light, though it travels at nearly one hundred thousand leagues per second, is only now arriving at the place in the Heavens occupied by the Earth. Indeed, it may be that numbers of these stars have been extinguished by the time earthly mortals were able to see their light; yet the ray emitted from these stars when they were alive continues to survive them, passing irrevocably into space, and perhaps arriving at our planet. So that the man who looks up and admires the Heavens is often looking at suns that no longer exist, which he nonetheless perceives as a result of that phantom ray in the Illusion of the universe.
Well, my lord Celian, this mechanism is so sensitive that it can record the energy, almost nonexistent, almost imaginary, of a beam from one of these stars. There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination.
Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument. I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks - and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars. (681-2, emphasis mine)
[«Bien avant que la Terre fût même une nébuleuse, des astres brillaient depuis une sorte d’éternité, mais, hélas! si éloignés, si éloignés, d’elle, que leur radieuse lueur, en parcourant près de cent mille lieues par seconde, n’est arrivée que récemment à la place occupée par la Terre dans le Ciel. Et il se trouve que plusieurs de ces astres se sont éteints depuis longtemps, avant qu’il ait été possible à leurs mortels de distinguer cette Terre. Cependant le rayon sorti de ces astres refroidis devait leur survivre. Il continua sa marche irrévocable dans l’étendu. C’est ainsi qu’aujourd’hui le rayon de quelques-uns de ces foyers en cendres est parvenu jusqu’à nous. De sorte que l’homme qui contemple le Ciel y admire souvent des soleils qui n’existent plus et qu’il y aperçoit quand même, grâce à ce rayon fantôme, dans l’Illusion de l’univers.
«Eh bien! cet appareil, Milord Celian, est tellement sensible qu’il pèse la chaleur presque nulle, presque imaginaire, d’un rayon de ces sortes d’étoiles. Il en est même de si lointaines que leur lueur ne parviendra jusqu’à la Terre que lorsque celle-ci se sera éteinte comme elles se sont éteintes, et qu’elle aura passé sans même avoir été connue de ce rayon désolé.
«Pour moi, souvent, pendent les belles nuits, quand le parc de cette habitation est solitaire, je me munis de cet instrument merveilleux; je viens en haut, je m’aventure sur l’herbe, je vais m’asseoir sur le banc de l’Allée des chênes, - et là, je me plais, toute seule, à peser des rayons d’étoiles mortes.» (OCI 941-2)]
What is striking here is not the marvelous instrument, but its user and temporal imaginary. The English translator takes a liberty I find quite illuminating, a liberty that emphasizes what the French text makes implicit, by inserting the following at the end of the second to last paragraph cited above: “without a living source, without a living destination.” These two clauses describe a cosmology, the immediate scene, and the character itself. The immensity of distance between points emphasizes the lifelessness of both the star and the Earth, and invokes a cosmos in which only the dead communicate.
The structure of that transfer of light (from dead star to dead planet) is repeated in the person of the andréide. Her voice, “without a living source” (since it is Sowana the spirit from the beyond that is Hadaly’s soul), “without a living destination” (Hadaly the automaton), animates Hoffman’s “hieroglyphs…of the Eternal from beyond the grave” in a decadent mode and transforms the romanticism of the early nineteenth century into the apocalyptic dandyism of the fin de siècle, obsessed as it was with endings and annihilation. In giving this lesson, the andréide comes to occupy the position of the scientist - the automaton become astronomer. The cosmology is almost eternal (a "sort of eternity") and the stars' energy almost nothing, almost immeasureable, reflecting a basic ambivalence toward the judeo-catholic cosmology visible elsewhere in the novel (at one point Edison inveighs against progress's destruction of "6000 years" of history and tradition etc.).
Until the 1920s and the advent of Einstein’s theories of relativity, modern astronomy’s basic cosmology was infinite: with no beginning or end, either in time or in space. This infinity, as historian and astronomer Antonio Ten Rose explains, constituted “a reaction against the mythic universes of many cultures, finite, embraced by their creators,” a reaction that “detached God from the universe” (Ten Ros, 322). And this infinity, as has been seen elsewhere, was quintessentially mechanical, though the means by which it could be apprehended were less and less so; new techniques, such as photometry, photography, and spectroscopy, and increasingly sophisticated mathematics enabled the astronomer to extend his reach “into regions previously inaccessible to instruments,” as the French astrophysicist L.M. Celinkier explains (184). The extent to which Comte would be proven wrong, in his assertion earlier in the century, that the beyond of the solar system was inaccessible to positive knowledge, would be striking. Celinkier persuasively invokes the first stanza of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” to convey the ambitions (and perceived grasp) of astronomy at the end of the nineteenth century: “To see a world in a grain of sand,/And heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/And eternity in an hour.”
This period was also the moment of a great explosion of writings on popular science, which can be accounted for on a number of levels: the development of scientific disciplinarity, the rise of mass communication (and its increasingly visual discourses), and the establishment of the Third Republic (particularly its attendant educational reforms). The success of popularizers like Flammarion would reinforce the boundaries between scientist and nonscientist even as they attempted to transcend them in the transmission of science to the masses; as “the figurehead of a growing movement of amateur and popular science,” as Brian Stableford characterizes him, Flammarion provides a unique perspective on the discursive development of those boundaries (“Introduction,” Lumen, xii).
Camille Flammarion, born four years after Villiers, was one of the most successful popularizers of astronomy in the nineteenth century. He wrote, published and spoke publicly continually until his death in 1925, and transformed the understanding of scientific knowledge and scientific method for thousands of everyday people. He began his professional life very publicly wriggling out from under the tutelage of Urbain Le Verrier (1811-77), the Second Empire astronomer who famously discovered Neptune without ever having seen it, by pure calculation. As Danielle Chaperon explains, because of the popularity of Flammarion’s works, Le Verrier would forever be considered “the typical representative of a myopic and phlegmatic astronomy,” now obsolete (17). As Flammarion would say in his 1889 Uranie, “the astronomy of our schools and observatories today, mathematical astronomy, the science of Newton, of Laplace, of Le Verrier, is no longer definitive....From now on the heart of the savant will fight for an even nobler conquest” (my translation, cited p 17).
Flammarion had a gift for literary language that he brought to bear to the task of making the heavens accessible to the average Frenchman, and was a tireless self-publicist. Placed in the context of other astronomers who promoted popular dissemination of scientific knowledge, like Fontenelle and Arago (whose writings were more plainly didactic), Flammarion intensified the ambiguity in the relationship between scientific discourse and literary language in the transmission of scientific knowledge. This relationship is in some ways akin to that between the illusionary spectacle of the phantasmagoria (a seamless representation of the supernatural qua supernatural) and its resolutely scientific ambitions with regard to its mechanics (to demonstrate the effectiveness of techniques to produce objective knowledge about the material world). Flammarion, it can be argued, retained the flair of the phantasmagorist, the performative dimension transmuted from stage to text (though sometimes still on stage: his tremendously popular lectures given in 1866 used slides projecting images with limelight).
I want now to compare the description of the travel of light through the universe offered by Hadaly with that offered by Flammarion. In this I am following rather closely Chaperon’s work on the immortality of the soul and the persistence of images in Flammarion, which treats these themes in relation to a variety of other literary texts such as Nerval’s translation of and introduction to Goethe’s Faust II, as well as Villiers’s L'Eve future.
Regarding the physics of light, Flammarion’s departure from the strictly scientific made literary use of the wave theory of light: he combines the idea of the non-instantaneousness of the transmission of light and the figure of speech used by Arago, in his Astronomie Populaire (1857), that starlight tells a story, and provides an explanation for the Spiritist doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Here is Arago’s sentence:
“the starlight that reaches us tells us, if I may be permitted to express it thus, the ancient history of these stars.” (Astronomie Populaire, vol I, 363) (my translation, cited Chaperon, 49)
[“les rayons lumineux qui nous arrivent des étoiles nous racontent..., s’il est permis de s’exprimer, l’histoire ancienne de ces astres.”]
Flammarion takes this idea literally, that light contains a record of events. His first use of this, in an article published in 1865, copies Arago almost word for word, at least in the first half of the sentence):
“The rays of light that come to us from the stars tell an ancient story of the infinite world of creations the present history of which is unknown on this poor earth.”
[“Les rayons lumineux qui nous arrive des étoiles nous racontent l’histoire ancienne d’un monde infini de créations dont l’histoire présente est inconnue à cette pauvre terre.”] (my translation, Chaperon’s emphasis, 49)
The most striking instance, in Uranie, has a rather more consoling tone:
...the ray of light contains within itself everything that is visible. As nothing is ever lost, the history of each and every world, contained in the light that it incessantly and successively gives off, eternally traverses infinite space, never to be destroyed. (my translation, Uranie 244)
[...le rayon lumineux contient en lui-même tout ce qui est visible. Comme ne rien se perd, l’histoire de chaque monde, contenue dans la lumière qui émane incessamment et successivement traverse éternellement l’espace infini sans jamais pouvoir être anéantie.]
Because of the advances in spectroscopy, ever more powerful telescopes, and increasingly sophisticated uses of photography, these images can be captured; there is for Flammarion, as Chaperon explains, "no longer a need for vagabond stars (comets) who happen to be in a good position for observing the earth, because all phenomena persist in the cosmos in the form of luminous images."
This idea that light contains a record of past events is a tremendously fertile trope for a literary imagination, as Chaperon shows. There's Goethe's Faust II, where Helen's image is available thanks to the eternal wave of images issuing from the past: les ondulations des siècles, as Georges Poulet would put it. And Edmond de Goncourt: "the imagining of a sudden transportation to the stars, at the moment when the clarifying light of an earthly event arrives at that spot among the stars.” Villiers would focus on sound for his iteration of this theme of the survival of events from the past and the technical possibility for their capture, in Edison's reveries that open the novel. For Edison, however, those sounds would be forever lost without someone having been in the right place at the right time to capture them: "Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss, and now too distant to be recaptured! ...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?" (Book I Chapter 3)
If for Flammarion there is no end and nothing can ever be destroyed, for Villiers both beginnings and endings are murkily discernible, but despite advances in chemistry and instrumentation, the situation of the observer is still dependent on chance. And attenuation, rather than the unceasing and successive issue of light, is the reigning operation.
Which brings me back to our GRB 090423: the flash-mob of astronomers I mentioned earlier were able to view and capture most of the event, but not all, and not as clearly as they would have liked. As you can see in the fora and the comment sections of all these articles I've been citing, the question of beginnings and endings is still unanswered, and the observer still has to set up his instrument somewhere other than a chicken roost:
Swift's X-Ray Telescope trained itself on GRB 090423 just 73 seconds after the satellite's Burst Alert instrument picked up the signal of the event, and Tanvir's team had the U.K. Infra-Red Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii looking at the afterglow just 20 minutes after the burst. But the weather in Hawaii was not ideal, and this particular gamma-ray burst was not especially bright, limiting the amount of additional information astronomers could glean from the explosion.
In principle, Tanvir says, a bright, well-observed GRB at great distances could expose the makeup of the intergalactic medium as well as the chemistry of the star's host galaxy, which would in turn indicate the products of previous generations of stars.
As for the galaxy to which GRB 090423 belongs, Tanvir says that his group will be using the Hubble Space Telescope next year to seek it out, now that its location has been marked. "We hope to locate the host galaxy," he says. "We have very little idea of what galaxies were like at that time. We have only very sketchy ideas."
NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.
The traces of the star they found indicate that "the progenitor star appears to belong to the second or third generation of stars, rather than the first generation." We've come a long way since Edison's tasimeter.
Astronomers were in the right place at the right time to witness and capture this event thanks to the text message they received from NASA's Swift satellite: astronomer flash-mob ftw! I would love it if this somehow got worked into an episode of The Big Bang Theory.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.
Research into gamma-ray bursts like this one "...brings us close to that magical point of first light," says Volker Bromm, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. "We don't have to get much farther to catch the earliest stars."
The Fermi gamma-ray space telescope is also in the news, having just released a video of its first year of imaging gamma-ray activity. It's kind of beautiful, and mundane, and not at all what popular astronomy of the late 19th C imagined would be captured: the history of everything that has ever happened, somehow inscribed on the arriving light in a way yet to be deciphered (most certainly decipherable at some point).
Click to viewNeato, huh? Anyway, back to GRB 090423.
The comment thread on Discover's 80beats blog raises an interesting question regarding the calculation of the event's age and location: what about inflation magnitude? Someone else on another blog asks a similar question: how are these calculations correct if that inflation rate "would put this object moving away from us at beyond the speed of light after it was 4 to 6 billion years old"? What is the speed of space, as it were?
This thread over at physicsforums.com gives something of an answer (that the question is nonsense, since "expansion of space" is a "property of a particular coordinate system" and not a force) (I don't understand it either). It has something to do with scalar systems, local vs global, the former being one in which we can look back 13 billion years and see this star's death, still within our cosmological horizon, the latter being one without horizon, one of eternal inflation. Apparently this question confuses laypeople and physicists alike, and I won't get close to untangling it in this post, but I found this particular partial answer quite consonant with the cosmological imaginary of Villiers's moment:
"...when when space does expand at this rate [at the speed of light], none of the force carriers from any particle will be able to reach another particle: no gravity, no light, no atoms, just lonely particles."
This is of course the central image of ch 5, Villiers's imagining of the extremes of time and space communicating with each other, an imagining that has an emotional tenor to which we still seem to be subject, as evidenced by that comment on Science Now's blog:
Before, long before the Earth was even part of a nebula, stars were shining, as they had shone for a sort of eternity; but alas!, so far from the earth that their radiant light, though it travels at nearly one hundred thousand leagues per second, is only now arriving at the place in the Heavens occupied by the Earth. Indeed, it may be that numbers of these stars have been extinguished by the time earthly mortals were able to see their light; yet the ray emitted from these stars when they were alive continues to survive them, passing irrevocably into space, and perhaps arriving at our planet. So that the man who looks up and admires the Heavens is often looking at suns that no longer exist, which he nonetheless perceives as a result of that phantom ray in the Illusion of the universe.
Well, my lord Celian, this mechanism is so sensitive that it can record the energy, almost nonexistent, almost imaginary, of a beam from one of these stars. There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination.
Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument. I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks - and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars. (681-2, emphasis mine)
[«Bien avant que la Terre fût même une nébuleuse, des astres brillaient depuis une sorte d’éternité, mais, hélas! si éloignés, si éloignés, d’elle, que leur radieuse lueur, en parcourant près de cent mille lieues par seconde, n’est arrivée que récemment à la place occupée par la Terre dans le Ciel. Et il se trouve que plusieurs de ces astres se sont éteints depuis longtemps, avant qu’il ait été possible à leurs mortels de distinguer cette Terre. Cependant le rayon sorti de ces astres refroidis devait leur survivre. Il continua sa marche irrévocable dans l’étendu. C’est ainsi qu’aujourd’hui le rayon de quelques-uns de ces foyers en cendres est parvenu jusqu’à nous. De sorte que l’homme qui contemple le Ciel y admire souvent des soleils qui n’existent plus et qu’il y aperçoit quand même, grâce à ce rayon fantôme, dans l’Illusion de l’univers.
«Eh bien! cet appareil, Milord Celian, est tellement sensible qu’il pèse la chaleur presque nulle, presque imaginaire, d’un rayon de ces sortes d’étoiles. Il en est même de si lointaines que leur lueur ne parviendra jusqu’à la Terre que lorsque celle-ci se sera éteinte comme elles se sont éteintes, et qu’elle aura passé sans même avoir été connue de ce rayon désolé.
«Pour moi, souvent, pendent les belles nuits, quand le parc de cette habitation est solitaire, je me munis de cet instrument merveilleux; je viens en haut, je m’aventure sur l’herbe, je vais m’asseoir sur le banc de l’Allée des chênes, - et là, je me plais, toute seule, à peser des rayons d’étoiles mortes.» (OCI 941-2)]
What is striking here is not the marvelous instrument, but its user and temporal imaginary. The English translator takes a liberty I find quite illuminating, a liberty that emphasizes what the French text makes implicit, by inserting the following at the end of the second to last paragraph cited above: “without a living source, without a living destination.” These two clauses describe a cosmology, the immediate scene, and the character itself. The immensity of distance between points emphasizes the lifelessness of both the star and the Earth, and invokes a cosmos in which only the dead communicate.
The structure of that transfer of light (from dead star to dead planet) is repeated in the person of the andréide. Her voice, “without a living source” (since it is Sowana the spirit from the beyond that is Hadaly’s soul), “without a living destination” (Hadaly the automaton), animates Hoffman’s “hieroglyphs…of the Eternal from beyond the grave” in a decadent mode and transforms the romanticism of the early nineteenth century into the apocalyptic dandyism of the fin de siècle, obsessed as it was with endings and annihilation. In giving this lesson, the andréide comes to occupy the position of the scientist - the automaton become astronomer. The cosmology is almost eternal (a "sort of eternity") and the stars' energy almost nothing, almost immeasureable, reflecting a basic ambivalence toward the judeo-catholic cosmology visible elsewhere in the novel (at one point Edison inveighs against progress's destruction of "6000 years" of history and tradition etc.).
Until the 1920s and the advent of Einstein’s theories of relativity, modern astronomy’s basic cosmology was infinite: with no beginning or end, either in time or in space. This infinity, as historian and astronomer Antonio Ten Rose explains, constituted “a reaction against the mythic universes of many cultures, finite, embraced by their creators,” a reaction that “detached God from the universe” (Ten Ros, 322). And this infinity, as has been seen elsewhere, was quintessentially mechanical, though the means by which it could be apprehended were less and less so; new techniques, such as photometry, photography, and spectroscopy, and increasingly sophisticated mathematics enabled the astronomer to extend his reach “into regions previously inaccessible to instruments,” as the French astrophysicist L.M. Celinkier explains (184). The extent to which Comte would be proven wrong, in his assertion earlier in the century, that the beyond of the solar system was inaccessible to positive knowledge, would be striking. Celinkier persuasively invokes the first stanza of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” to convey the ambitions (and perceived grasp) of astronomy at the end of the nineteenth century: “To see a world in a grain of sand,/And heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/And eternity in an hour.”
This period was also the moment of a great explosion of writings on popular science, which can be accounted for on a number of levels: the development of scientific disciplinarity, the rise of mass communication (and its increasingly visual discourses), and the establishment of the Third Republic (particularly its attendant educational reforms). The success of popularizers like Flammarion would reinforce the boundaries between scientist and nonscientist even as they attempted to transcend them in the transmission of science to the masses; as “the figurehead of a growing movement of amateur and popular science,” as Brian Stableford characterizes him, Flammarion provides a unique perspective on the discursive development of those boundaries (“Introduction,” Lumen, xii).
Camille Flammarion, born four years after Villiers, was one of the most successful popularizers of astronomy in the nineteenth century. He wrote, published and spoke publicly continually until his death in 1925, and transformed the understanding of scientific knowledge and scientific method for thousands of everyday people. He began his professional life very publicly wriggling out from under the tutelage of Urbain Le Verrier (1811-77), the Second Empire astronomer who famously discovered Neptune without ever having seen it, by pure calculation. As Danielle Chaperon explains, because of the popularity of Flammarion’s works, Le Verrier would forever be considered “the typical representative of a myopic and phlegmatic astronomy,” now obsolete (17). As Flammarion would say in his 1889 Uranie, “the astronomy of our schools and observatories today, mathematical astronomy, the science of Newton, of Laplace, of Le Verrier, is no longer definitive....From now on the heart of the savant will fight for an even nobler conquest” (my translation, cited p 17).
Flammarion had a gift for literary language that he brought to bear to the task of making the heavens accessible to the average Frenchman, and was a tireless self-publicist. Placed in the context of other astronomers who promoted popular dissemination of scientific knowledge, like Fontenelle and Arago (whose writings were more plainly didactic), Flammarion intensified the ambiguity in the relationship between scientific discourse and literary language in the transmission of scientific knowledge. This relationship is in some ways akin to that between the illusionary spectacle of the phantasmagoria (a seamless representation of the supernatural qua supernatural) and its resolutely scientific ambitions with regard to its mechanics (to demonstrate the effectiveness of techniques to produce objective knowledge about the material world). Flammarion, it can be argued, retained the flair of the phantasmagorist, the performative dimension transmuted from stage to text (though sometimes still on stage: his tremendously popular lectures given in 1866 used slides projecting images with limelight).
I want now to compare the description of the travel of light through the universe offered by Hadaly with that offered by Flammarion. In this I am following rather closely Chaperon’s work on the immortality of the soul and the persistence of images in Flammarion, which treats these themes in relation to a variety of other literary texts such as Nerval’s translation of and introduction to Goethe’s Faust II, as well as Villiers’s L'Eve future.
Regarding the physics of light, Flammarion’s departure from the strictly scientific made literary use of the wave theory of light: he combines the idea of the non-instantaneousness of the transmission of light and the figure of speech used by Arago, in his Astronomie Populaire (1857), that starlight tells a story, and provides an explanation for the Spiritist doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Here is Arago’s sentence:
“the starlight that reaches us tells us, if I may be permitted to express it thus, the ancient history of these stars.” (Astronomie Populaire, vol I, 363) (my translation, cited Chaperon, 49)
[“les rayons lumineux qui nous arrivent des étoiles nous racontent..., s’il est permis de s’exprimer, l’histoire ancienne de ces astres.”]
Flammarion takes this idea literally, that light contains a record of events. His first use of this, in an article published in 1865, copies Arago almost word for word, at least in the first half of the sentence):
“The rays of light that come to us from the stars tell an ancient story of the infinite world of creations the present history of which is unknown on this poor earth.”
[“Les rayons lumineux qui nous arrive des étoiles nous racontent l’histoire ancienne d’un monde infini de créations dont l’histoire présente est inconnue à cette pauvre terre.”] (my translation, Chaperon’s emphasis, 49)
The most striking instance, in Uranie, has a rather more consoling tone:
...the ray of light contains within itself everything that is visible. As nothing is ever lost, the history of each and every world, contained in the light that it incessantly and successively gives off, eternally traverses infinite space, never to be destroyed. (my translation, Uranie 244)
[...le rayon lumineux contient en lui-même tout ce qui est visible. Comme ne rien se perd, l’histoire de chaque monde, contenue dans la lumière qui émane incessamment et successivement traverse éternellement l’espace infini sans jamais pouvoir être anéantie.]
Because of the advances in spectroscopy, ever more powerful telescopes, and increasingly sophisticated uses of photography, these images can be captured; there is for Flammarion, as Chaperon explains, "no longer a need for vagabond stars (comets) who happen to be in a good position for observing the earth, because all phenomena persist in the cosmos in the form of luminous images."
This idea that light contains a record of past events is a tremendously fertile trope for a literary imagination, as Chaperon shows. There's Goethe's Faust II, where Helen's image is available thanks to the eternal wave of images issuing from the past: les ondulations des siècles, as Georges Poulet would put it. And Edmond de Goncourt: "the imagining of a sudden transportation to the stars, at the moment when the clarifying light of an earthly event arrives at that spot among the stars.” Villiers would focus on sound for his iteration of this theme of the survival of events from the past and the technical possibility for their capture, in Edison's reveries that open the novel. For Edison, however, those sounds would be forever lost without someone having been in the right place at the right time to capture them: "Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss, and now too distant to be recaptured! ...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?" (Book I Chapter 3)
If for Flammarion there is no end and nothing can ever be destroyed, for Villiers both beginnings and endings are murkily discernible, but despite advances in chemistry and instrumentation, the situation of the observer is still dependent on chance. And attenuation, rather than the unceasing and successive issue of light, is the reigning operation.
Which brings me back to our GRB 090423: the flash-mob of astronomers I mentioned earlier were able to view and capture most of the event, but not all, and not as clearly as they would have liked. As you can see in the fora and the comment sections of all these articles I've been citing, the question of beginnings and endings is still unanswered, and the observer still has to set up his instrument somewhere other than a chicken roost:
Swift's X-Ray Telescope trained itself on GRB 090423 just 73 seconds after the satellite's Burst Alert instrument picked up the signal of the event, and Tanvir's team had the U.K. Infra-Red Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii looking at the afterglow just 20 minutes after the burst. But the weather in Hawaii was not ideal, and this particular gamma-ray burst was not especially bright, limiting the amount of additional information astronomers could glean from the explosion.
In principle, Tanvir says, a bright, well-observed GRB at great distances could expose the makeup of the intergalactic medium as well as the chemistry of the star's host galaxy, which would in turn indicate the products of previous generations of stars.
As for the galaxy to which GRB 090423 belongs, Tanvir says that his group will be using the Hubble Space Telescope next year to seek it out, now that its location has been marked. "We hope to locate the host galaxy," he says. "We have very little idea of what galaxies were like at that time. We have only very sketchy ideas."