This is one of the most exciting times in astronomy and physics imaginable. Where did it all come from? Why do the fundamental particles of the universe that we are aware of so far have mass, such widely different masses; how do they obtain their mass? The search is on for a particle predicted by the standard model of fundamental particles and interactions, called the Higgs boson. Will it be found, what does it mean if it is found, what is the latest in terms of discovery that is happening with this yet to be seen particle?

Fermions are the name given to the smallest building blocks of matter and anti-matter that we are aware of. In the case of matter, we call them leptons and quarks and in the case of anti-matter we call them anti-quarks and anti-leptons. What are they? There are six kinds of leptons including the electron. Leptons do not interact with one another via the strong nuclear force. All the leptons predicted by the standard model have been identified experimentally.

There are six types of quarks. Unlike leptons, they have never been found individually. They combine to form composite particles called hadrons, which include the proton and neutron. All quarks predicted by the standard model have been detected experimentally including the top quark in 1995, by far the most massive of all the quarks, more than 20 years after it was predicted to exist.

So, what remains to be verified in the standard model? There is a lot to consider. Let’s first not forget the bosons. When forces occur, it is thought that particles are exchanged. There are four known forces in the universe. They are electromagnetic, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity.

The exchange particle or the particle that mediates the strong force is called the gluon. The W boson and the Z boson mediate the weak force, and the photon is the exchange particle for electromagnetic force. All of these particles have been found. In the standard model there is yet one particle that is theorized to exist that has not been found. It is said to mediate the field that gives all particles the masses that they have, the Higgs boson.

The standard model, which by the way does not describe the fourth force, gravity, predicts only one Higgs boson to explain for example why the W and Z bosons are so massive compared to the photon which has a zero mass. The standard model does not incorporate the physics of general relativity or explain gravity, falls short of describing the existence of dark matter, and many more exotic models of particle physics have been proposed. Is there a new physics that should be adopted in place of the standard model? Is that new physics, an extension to the standard model called supersymmetry, which incorporates all four known forces of the universe?

This is where particle accelerators come in. The Large Hadron Collider is accelerating particles into collisions of heretofore never achieved energies. The Higgs boson, should it exist, should be found. The big, recent news, is that at Fermilab collision of protons and antiprotons are producing pairs of matter particles more often than pairs of antimatter particles. This suggests there are five distinct Higgs bosons and not one, in line with supersymmetry and going against the Standard Model. One day, perhaps soon, the Large Hadron Collider will settle this, not just between the two theories, but possibly even more will be discerned.

To aid in this, the other most recent development as reported by BBC news is that researchers have simulated the sounds set to be made by sub-atomic particles such as the Higgs boson when they are produced at the Large Hadron Collider. A software engineer working on the project is reported by BBC news to have said that those who have been involved working on the project have felt something akin to a religious experience while listening to the sounds of the data. “The deeper you go, the more of a pattern you find and it’s fascinating and uplifting.” What more could anyone add to that?

I do blog often about the dreams of children, because children are our future, the future of science, the future parents and society members, and they are God given treasures to us all.  Therefore, I must tell you about a very first remembered dream of a two year old future member of society and potentially a scientist, but we shall have to see.

His mother first noticed something unusual when she was sitting at the edge of his bed while he was still asleep, with the family cat, when Nathan jumped out of his sleep state literally, flying toward her and Simba.  In a completely excited state, little Nathan reminded her she had told him to jump out of the way, specifically out of the way of the giant blue butterfly, so big that you could hear the air swishing when it flapped its wings.  Now here is the kicker.  Nathan began at that point to search his covers behind him for the breathtaking winged creature.  Now Mom had to think fast.  She explained very gently to him that he was the only person in the world who could see the beautiful butterfly because he had dreamed it, and that perhaps he shouldn’t expect to find it where he had last seen it, behind him on his bed.  Nathan still continued to search for it.

Mom went on to explain that she did understand that in the dream she had seen it too and that she herself had advised him to get out of the way of the butterfly’s path, but that did not mean that she had really seen it herself.  For he had dreamed her too.

In the dreams of children we will explore to far reaching corners of this galaxy and this universe, and because of their young ages, some might indeed see that take place.  Are there other children of others in these corners of the universe, searching for us too?  From their perspective should they exist, we are in the corners of the universe as well.

Can you imagine searching for something that you believe should be there and never finding it? Envision perhaps searching for a particular box that was delivered to a convention center in which you are holding a very large event. The box was delivered to a particular room, or so you thought. You search the room everywhere just prior to the event, and cannot find the box. In the box is the equipment and the frequency information needed for your staff to stay in communication with one another once the public event is underway.

You deem that there was probably a mix-up and the box was delivered to a different room in the convention center. You begin an exhaustive search for the box, searching rooms in every direction from your point of origin, where you originally thought the box was delivered, and at every distance. No box. No matter where you look the box you believe should be there doesn’t show up.

We have been listening or searching the heavens around us for more than 40 years, listening for what we call a Wow signal from space, an indication that another civilization has sent a powerful radio signal to announce their presence and existence in this universe. We have never found a Wow signal, with the exception of the one received on Earth on August 15, 1977, at a radio telescope at Ohio State University. That signal was never duplicated, and can therefore not be considered the Wow signal, which would signal the existence of an intelligent life form that sent the signal artificially. The one unverified signal came from an area just northwest of M55 pictured above, a globular cluster of 100,000 stars inside the constellation of Sagittarius.

Eventually, you find out why you could not locate the box anywhere in the convention center. It’s not that you had the wrong room, and searching every possible room in the center would ultimately produce the box. It was that your information on when the box would be delivered to the center was incorrect. You were searching two days before the box had even been delivered there. Your search that day no matter where you looked would turn up nothing, just as our search of the universe for civilizations transmitting that they are there and exist has turned up nothing. This is not what we would predict in such a vast universe of countless stars and undoubtedly countless planets as well. Where is that box and where are the aliens?

Taking the path of our analogy, perhaps we are looking too soon. What would change in time to allow us to finally detect a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization? We would, of course. Perhaps, for example, in time we will be able to transmit and receive information through quantum entanglement. Right now if every advanced civilization in the universe were communicating that way, we would have no way to register the data from the transmission. Our technology has just not advanced that far yet.

What proof can I offer that this analogy may offer some insight into why we have not observed a single instance of a Wow signal? None, actually. But, circumstantially one might consider the complete absence of a signal or quiet from space to be like a deserted city. Upon seeing or detecting a deserted city, we recognize immediately that something is wrong. What could be wrong is that civilizations that don’t know what 96% of the universe is actually made of also don’t know with 100% certainty how communication across the distances of space is most logically accomplished. If we were to just wait a while, the box will definitely turn up, and so might an unimaginable number of Wow signals.

As Robert and I drove to school this week, I told him about a couple of his grandfather’s astronomy students who drove across the desert to get to the star party over the weekend.  They got lost in the desert having left the official roads.  Robert commented that sounded like a fun thing to do.  I countered with the fact that they might have just achieved the Darwin Award for doing that.  He asked what that was.

I explained that the Darwin Award is given to people who take themselves out of the gene pool by making poor decisions that affect their own survival.  That is said with humor of course, but then I thought that Robert and I had better review the concept of change or adaptation within a population that come about genetically that work well with survival. 

I said, “Just imagine there is a population of brown lizards that live in a predominantly green jungle, and there is this large animal that just goes around eating them, picking them off, because the brown lizards are easily spotted against the green foliage.”  I went on of course to brilliantly describe the factors at work which might result in better survival of green lizards that come along, and increase their numbers, while the brown lizards…  Then, I noticed I seemed to have lost Robert who was apparently still smiling from the thought of the large creature picking off the easily targeted lizards, and realized I couldn’t compete with myself having entertained Robert so completely already.

There was a time when the subject of our Milky Way galaxy might be approached by showing a diagram of our spiral galaxy and the location of our solar system some 28,000 light years from the galactic center. The caption might have read, "The Sun is in the Milky Way Galaxy." With the insights we now have about the nature of how material or star stuff is recycled in our galaxy, a better title for such an introduction to our galaxy might be, "The Sun exists because of the Milky Way galaxy.”

Within our own Milky Way, but twenty thousand light years away from our solar system is a giant nebula which hosts an amazing star forming region. A massive young cluster is central to this image taken by Hubble. The hot blue stars in this cluster have enough ultraviolet radiation and violent winds to blow out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust that surrounds the cluster. This is one of the ways that stars give back their material to our greater galaxy. They do so in life, as these massive stars are doing with their solar winds.

And they do so in death. In this region located in the Carina spiral arm of our galaxy, to the upper right of center in the image, the blue supergiant Sher 25 is nearing the end of its life. It has a spectacular circumstellar ring around it of glowing gas. This ring is the counterpart to the precursor to supernova 1987 A. The bipolar material to the upper right of the star and the lower left are a testament to the enriched material that the star is ejecting prior to the violent death in which it will ultimately recycle the heavier elements as a supernova.

There is more than meets the eye in this region of our galaxy. For here is also the evidence of giant molecular clouds being eroded away by the light of the cluster. In the far upper right of the image, some dark Bok globules (which look like dark cocoons) may contain forming stars, and the two tadpole shaped protoplanetary disks (proplyds) to the lower left of the cluster, may be evolved globules further along in the process of producing planets around forming stars. There is a price to pay for the proximity to the ionizing ultraviolet radiation of the star cluster. The highly dense pillars are all that remain of the cold molecular cloud, and the poor proplyds which are in fact evaporation from the planetary disks themselves will probably completely ionize away.

As we see the stages of star formation all in one place, which begins and which ends the process? Indeed supernova will send out hot bubbles of gas behind shock waves that will merge with other bubbles once many of those massive stars in the cluster begin to age and die, and soon, with enough size, giant bubbles cannot be contained in our Milky Way's disk. What is almost like a volcanic eruption on the galactic scale will erupt hot gas from the superbubble, and a fountain of cooled ejected gas may rain down upon the disk of the Milky Way because of the disk's own gravity, recycling cooled star stuff enriched with the heavier elements of life. A fountain of youth so to speak.

So as your eye travels from molecular cloud to a dying blue supergiant, it is clear there is a circle of life; start where you may. It is clear this circle is maintained by our galaxy, and how it came to be is one of the most amazing factors of this universe. Or perhaps we already know that our galaxy and countless others are the green lizards upon the green foliage of our remarkable universe.

Robert did it again!  As I was driving him to school yesterday morning, he happened to mention he had a cool dream.  He said that he was in the other room, meaning the living room at his house not the family room in his dream, and his mother’s very special cat, Simba (Simba is a Savannah) was about to jump up, but got his front paws stuck on the carpet.

Robert asked his parents, “What’s wrong with Simba?”  Just then Simba broke free of the carpet and his front quarters and the rest of him, naturally, floated up to the ceiling just as his hind quarters had been trying to do (in the dream of course).  Robert’s parents told him that Simba was doing that antigravity thing again.  Okay, no questions asked.  Simba came back down to the ground and that was the end of the dream.

You cannot argue with or question the dreams of children. They could very well grow up to do what space shuttle Challenger astronaut Bruce McCandless II did in 1984, using the Manned Maneuvering Unit to move 100 meters untethered from the space shuttle. Robert and his brother Nathan are often my inspiration for these blogs.  Robert’s inspiration is a very special cat that has antigravity capabilities.  Astronauts in low Earth orbit do too.  They move about, in free fall around their Earth in the vehicle which attained the speed at launch to remain this distance to perform their work and test new devices. 

Although gravity keeps them in this orbit, unlike anything on Earth launched below the speed of 17,500 miles per hour (like a child throwing a baseball for example), their fall under the pull of gravity will not touch them back to Earth.  Had they launched at 25,000 miles per hour, they would have broken free from Earth’s gravitational pull completely.

Robert cannot throw a baseball fast enough to achieve either freedom from Earth for study and exploration, nor can he yet find the way to do that for himself, but in his dreams his cat can do this.  One day, soon, perhaps, if we continue to supply the next generation with the programs and tools needed for exploration, Robert’s and Nathan’s accomplishments in exploration, could surpass any of our dreams

 

On matters of theories of physics, I am completely awestruck by the ideas of Stephen Hawking.  On more speculative matters, such as whether or not Hawking is reading God’s mind, or whether or not there are aliens in the universe, what seems most significant to me is that Hawking is talking about these subjects at all, whether or not I agree with him.  On the matter of the possible existence of aliens, I agree with him.

I am very glad that a mind like Stephen Hawking’s states plainly as day that there is likely alien life in the universe beyond our Earth, and that this life in some cases could be intelligent life.  Recently, some scientists have expressed concern that we are not finding solar systems exactly like our own, despite our detection methods which might favor stellar systems that are exactly not like ours.  Apparently, those do exist, and we keep finding those with large gas planets close to stars where they hardly seem to belong, and no sign of little Earth’s which make a fine nesting place for creatures like us.

I began to tell my students in my Astronomy class one or two lectures ago, “Doesn’t this sound familiar?” Referencing, that the ancients believed that there was something very special and unique about Earth, being in the center of the universe as they figured, and that by observations which they could interpret, this was plainly the truth.  After all, with some manipulation by human minds, the other celestial bodies could be described albeit somewhat complicatedly as orbiting the Earth in perfect circular orbits.  I told my students additionally, with poor measurement, we also deemed ourselves the center of our galaxy at some point in history.  And now, we express concern that there are simply no stellar systems like ours anywhere else potentially.  I stopped talking and stopped short of making a fool of myself.  I then told my students, with refined techniques I imagine that we will find many solar systems like our own.  Another myth busted.  Scientific discovery over time repeatedly tells us that our place in the universe is not unique, but are we?

Why should we be unique if the universe is homogeneous and isotropic and that every place on a large scale looks like every other place on a large scale?  Shall we make an exception in that for life, for us?  It is not likely.  It is not likely that we are the living end.  It is not likely that we are the beginning of anything but the determiners of our own destiny as to what we do with the time we are given to develop the insight into survival in a complex universe. 

It has never even been imaginably true to me that there is not life beyond the shores of our blue planet.  If Hawking has so stated now, let this type of thinking help us envision this life and when it will be found, not if.  But, Hawking addresses another idea.  Should it be found?  What might it be like?

What is the intelligent life like on Earth?  Some of our members are the best that has ever walked upon this planet, caring for the helpless, sick, infirmed, injured, impoverished, and abused with the open arms of saints.  Some of our members have brought atrocities upon the helpless and the conquered, enslaved and committed genocide.  What is life?  Do we see evidence of all good or all evil or absolutes?  Not here, not on this Earth, not on this unique Earth?  We know so much more than we acknowledge.

Hawking is right, but this blog and his ideas, all speculations.  One thing is for sure, like the Cartwheel Galaxy that once resembled our own, with the collision of our life with life forms not yet discovered from beyond our Earth, nothing will ever be the same.

My grandson Robert, who is 10, has fabulous dreams.  I have incorporated some of his dreams in previous blog installments.  I ask Robert if he had any good dreams the night before when I drive him to school in the morning.  Often, he says he didn’t have any dreams that he could remember and I am disappointed, but understand we can’t dream every single day.  But, last week, he did remember a dream.

He told me that in the dream he and his friends had devised a way to travel to another planet in a pod spaceship, there were five of them in all, four of Robert’s friends were with him in the dream, traveling to this distant world.

He explained that they hadn’t done sufficient research, and weren’t familiar with what the temperature conditions would be like on the planet, and all of them were dressed in cold weather gear with the exception of one friend who only had on his blue jeans and a T-shirt.  I asked if that friend were particularly cold, and Robert said he actually didn’t think so and that friend didn’t end up continuing on much during the rest of the dream.

There were ice blocks everywhere on the planet and a dark overcast sky that was indicative of an atmosphere.  These ice blocks were of many different sizes, and soon they set about sifting through the ice, which was filled with green particulate matter in patterns, to find any clues as to where they should go.  Ultimately, they found some kind of evidence that indicated the direction to an ancient temple, which needed to be explored.  Once there, they were informed by an extraterrestrial life form that the main people they would encounter on this planet were themselves, for the life form had cloned each and every one of them, with the possible exception of the presumably very cold explorer who was not dressed for the role of astronaut on that distant world, and had pretty much disappeared anyway.  The way Robert realized they had been cloned was when he saw one of his friends in one direction and looked the other way and saw that same friend again.

What are the value of dreams of a child; what do they reflect?  I pondered for a moment the number of disciplines that Robert’s dreamed spanned.  First, space travel, next, research, to use his word, next an ice planet with matter that was imbedded in the ice which ultimately revealed clues about the nature of the world, as though suggesting chemical analysis, a sense of archaeology from the exploration of an ancient structure, extraterrestrial life forms, and cloning. 

Robert has the benefit of going to a school which specializes in involving the students in NASA programs, in fact the entire school is dedicated to the exploration of space.  Every day, Robert hears about the universe from his grandmother, and his grandfather, also a professor of astronomy and a lifelong amateur astronomer, and from his mother and father who consider space exploration highly important.

What are the dreams of other children who do not get the message that the exploration of space is important?  They may indeed fantasize about space, but those dreams might have little to do with them, or their belief that it will play any part in their lives.

Our children are our future, they are the future of science and the ones who will make the difference if humanity will meet a destiny that is beyond our own world and survive.  If we as a nation and as a world do not tell these children that exploration matters, and that from science comes the technology for better communication, medical breakthrough, and often our very safety in a world filled with man-made and natural hazards, who then will tell them?  They will not be told, and the world will perhaps miss its chance to fulfill a role beyond Earth in the universe.

I always tell my students there is no other planet or moon in our solar system where human beings could exist without the aid of special protection from hazardous radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold, or lack of oxygen.  Our unique world in this solar system, the only one with liquid water on its surface, the only one with a temperate climate with the most profoundly balanced carbon dioxide cycle, which self-corrects over long spans of time to increase temperatures slightly when they have fallen or decrease temperatures slightly when they have risen, and with an ozone layer to protect us from ultraviolet radiation stands alone as the place that provides an environment not hazardous to our form of life. Put plainly, without special equipment, we would die anywhere else. 

So, why are we searching for life elsewhere in our solar system, when only Earth is in the habitable zone?  Why not wait for the discovery of other earth-like planets around other stars and once found, perhaps having seen free oxygen in their atmospheres spectroscopically or other evidence of life’s biomarkers on that world, go full force and target such a planet as the only place we might find life beyond Earth?  The reason is simple, we happen to know life that would not have a problem with extreme environments. 

Where have we discovered life like that?  In science fiction, perhaps?  In remote research laboratories that have uncovered special life transforming properties which could help life survive under extreme conditions?  In theoretical studies based on speculation about how life might form on other worlds?  Actually not.  In addition to learning new extreme tolerances of some life already known to exist on Earth, we have discovered an entire new branch of life on Earth. 

When did this happen?  An entire new branch of life was discovered on Earth and accepted as such only thirty years ago. In the late seventies, the scientific world was shocked by the discovery of an entirely new group of organisms – Archaea.  Where are Archaea found on Earth?  Everywhere, and in places that no one ever believed life could survive on this planet.  And the irony is, Archaea are likely among the oldest life forms on Earth, and those closest to the link that joins all life on this planet to a common ancestor to us all.

This oldest life had to survive extreme conditions at the beginnings of life on this planet.  Life might have begun on Earth more than 3.85 billion years ago, already thriving 3.5 billion years ago, having arisen within no more than a few hundred million years.  It might have arisen within a few tens of millions of years given that life could not have started until the end of the period of heavy bombardment of planetesimals.  All life prior to a few hundred million years ago was microscopic. 

Life on Earth, then is divided into three domains, Bacteria, Eurkarya (the domain to which all plants and animals belong), and Archaea.  The Archaea have had to retreat to environments to which they became suited as the oldest life on Earth.  Oxygen is poisonous to some Archaea.  Some love temperatures above 230 degrees Fahrenheit, above the boiling point of water!!! After all, they existed and do exist under the water where they were safe from ultraviolet radiation before cyanobateria produced enough oxygen through photosynthesis to begin to accumulate in the atmosphere (about 2 billion years ago) to create the ozone layer and protect life from the ultraviolet allowing life to come out of the ocean, and organisms to breathe it.  We find such Archaea in deep hyrdrothermal vents under the ocean now around seafloor volcanic vents and in hot springs in places like Yellowstone.  They don’t require sunlight, they get energy from chemical reactions in water that is heated volcanically by geologic activity.  Why is this important to the search for life beyond Earth and the search being conducted by astrobiologists in our own solar system?

What other places do some Archaea live on Earth along with some other life forms which have found to be able to survive in extreme environments - called extremophiles?  They live in highly acidic environments, in environments of extreme high alkalinity, in the absence of oxygen, inside rock buried deep within the Earth, in places of high concentration of salt, in limited nutrient conditions, at high hydrostatic pressures, in places of extremely low temperatures, and extremely high temperatures, in pools of benzene and nuclear waste, in highly radioactive environments, and in places of very low water activity such as hot and cold desert environments. 

Where else might such organisms be found?  The extreme environments on which they are found on Earth are characteristic of the common environments on many planetary bodies in our solar system beyond Earth.  Might we find life under the ice in the ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa in hydrothermal vents?  The two outer Galilean moons might also have subsurface oceans.  Might we find life flourishing amid the methane/ethane water cycle of Saturn’s Titan, or enjoying the ice geology of Neptune’s Triton, or perhaps on some of Uranus’ moons?  If the surface conditions of Mars seem too extreme to harbor life, might it not exist and flourish in Mars’ subsurface, especially in Martian caves where it is shielded from harmful radiation and where temperature conditions might not be that extreme, and water might be available?  It is not hard to imagine, and not even hard to imagine that life could survive and be transported between planets and celestial bodies via meteorites.  From what I have briefly touched on in this blog, unlike their human counterparts on Earth, the microbes would not even need space suits.

Robert is on Spring Break this week, and something extraordinary happened today.  His father happened to find out about a new capability of Google Maps last night.  So, today, Ryan showed his two sons this capability.  Clicking on the small icon of a person, gives one a Street View of many streets around the world.  The images, taken by vehicles equipped with special cameras create 360 degree panoramas as the vehicles drive along roads outside.

Ryan explored the neighborhood outside our house with his boys.  They “drove” past our house, then into the driveway, then backed out, went down adjacent streets and behind the house, saw one man captured in the data in full mask and work clothes, probably someone who works in home construction trying to get into a red truck or get something out of the truck, and continued on in that fashion exploring outside.  This is particularly poignant because due to a medical injury, Ryan cannot venture outside under any other circumstances.  Yet, he and his boys went there today from the confines of a family room on a sofa inside.

Data received from remote planetary spacecraft, which explore other worlds, is now in good part accessible to the public. Interested parties can do their own processing on NASA images taken from the surface of Mars by explorer robots, or work instead with images taken by spacecraft orbiting other planets or spacecraft flying by their encounters with distant worlds. People can analyze the data in the hopes of making viable contributions to some aspect of science or discovery uncovered in the exploration.

This is all to the good.  The day will also come when the general members of the public may routinely additionally command robotic vehicles and their cameras on other worlds, from the confines of whatever room their laptop computer is found, no matter where that room is on Earth.  So, hopefully young students will be able to engage not just the archived data of exploration, but create and plan the exploration and participate in it in real time.  What better way to involve young people and garner their interest in technical fields than to take them to field trips on other planets, and have them accomplish real science along the way?

I was involved in trying to facilitate this kind of exploration for young people as far back as the Mars Surveyor 2001 mission, which did not end up flying to Mars, but did open the door to student participation in the Mars Exploration Rover mission which made Sprit and Opportunity household robot words practically in every household on Earth.  I did this work for The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Without question, robots can go on ahead before the human beings arrive and pave the way with their observations and their studies, for humans to address the needs they will have upon their arrival to these places.  It is possible that Robert may yet get the chance to participate in the acquisition of data in real time exploration of Mars.  Perhaps he will feel that connection with what the Spirit rover was experiencing on Mars when it made the tracks in the picture above.  Perhaps he will deem the experience as relevant to him as the trek through the data outside his home on Earth.

Robert’s grandchildren may one day stand beside their father in a Mars colony with the father saying, “No, let’s allow the rover to view the terrain in that region one kilometer south, one more time, before we venture there tomorrow.”  Robert’s grandchildren may watch with their father what their robotic companion on Mars sees as it turns down one path and then another at their command on a near landscape to their small outpost as pioneers.  Ryan’s great grandchildren may look at their father as they see these familiar sites, commenting and marveling as Robert and Nathan did with Ryan today.

The race is on to look farther back into time than anyone has done before. The current title holder is held by Hubble.  With its renewed instruments, Hubble has seen galaxies as they looked 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang which is thought to have begun our universe.

Why do we care?  Astronomers want to know when the first star formation began in the universe and when the first galaxies appeared.  They have deeper more subtle mysteries to solve as well, as to when and how the reionization of the universe took place, lifting the fog of hydrogen that descended on the universe when the initial ionization of the universe in the primordial soup hotter than the Sun, cooled.  How did early stars heat the universe enough to make it transparent again, or did they, and if they didn’t what did?

Astronomers are now up against the limit of Hubble’s technology to look any farther back into time.  How is this accomplished?  The farther back into space one is able to see, the farther back in time one is looking, because it takes 13 billion years for light to reach us from objects 13 billion light years away.  These objects are seen as they were 13 billion years ago, on the edge of what is now the visible universe to us here on Earth, only hundreds of millions of years after our universe was born.

What have we learned?  Should we be surprised, that just as we think planets accreted from smaller planetesimals in our solar system, and perhaps came into being that way in other solar systems as well, galaxies seem to have accreted from smaller galaxies too?  Ultrablue galaxies on the edge of time show themselves to be what are likely the smaller constituents of the massive majestic galaxies, like our own galaxy presently is.  The processes of formation seem to be ubiquitous throughout the universe to our present knowledge, and throughout time.  Collision and accretion seem to the buzz words of formation.

One thing I seldom have seen mentioned anywhere, or perhaps have never seen mentioned, is not what we have learned about the past that we care about, but why do we care about the past at all?  It is very clear that human beings as well as galaxies have in some cases very insightful characteristics.  The early galaxies were small and blue because they were extremely deficient in heavier elements.  Human beings do care about, and study the past, because, because why?  We never ask ourselves what this characteristic of ours brings to light – that we have an intrinsic need to know about the past.

We also care about the future.  We care about the times that span before our lifetimes, which are the blink of an eye on cosmic scales of time, right back to the beginnings of our universe, and we seem to care about the future that will happen long after the blink of our life.  Children study history because we know of its importance, and we purchase life insurance policies for the people who will remain once we have gone.  We try to understand and influence human policy that will happen long after our individual lives.  Are we studying the implications of this interest of human beings in the past and the future as much as we are studying these infant galaxies and the fate of the universe?  Whatever we learn about human beings is likely a significant clue in the fate and evolution of the universe.  We are part of the universe’s truth.