Through a glass, darkly

THE STARSHIP Enterprise on the original Star Trek series had a five-year mission to go “where no man has gone before.” Now, teams of astronomers are jostling to investigate what no man has seen before: dark energy, which theorists say makes up 70 percent of the universe.

The search for dark energy began two decades ago when astronomers measuring the speed of stars encountered a big surprise. They figured gravity would be pulling the universe inward, so what they think began with a big bang would end in a big crunch. Instead, they learned the universe seems to be expanding faster and faster. What could counteract gravity? No one knew, but it had to be powerful. This energy force emitted no light and was invisible to even our largest telescopes: thus the name, dark energy.

When the Israelites wandered in the Sinai Desert sometime between 1450 and 1250 B.C., they survived by eating manna, a word translated as what is it? That’s the same question astronomers ask now about dark energy, and no one has the answer—but many will live on this manna for the next 40 years, as the mystery yields not only intellectual excitement but research grants.

Right now many teams are competing for knowledge, gold, and glory, with the winner probably receiving a Nobel Prize. One contender, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), uses a giant telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. BOSS astronomers brag that they have mapped “a record-breaking 1.2 million galaxies to study the properties of dark energy.”

The BOSS team includes Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Penn State, Ohio State, the University of Wisconsin, and Yale, along with Chinese, Japanese, and German institutions. BOSS has already found, according to its press release, that “Supermassive Black Holes Cause Galactic Warming.” We don’t need a state of emergency, but “distant future generations may see our supermassive black hole turning our galaxy into a red geyser.”

Another team, The Dark Energy Survey (DES), uses the massive Blanco Telescope in Chile. Among its tasks: plotting more than 10,000 galaxy clusters and measuring the spacing between galaxies/shapes of distant galaxies. The University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Ohio State, and institutions from England, Brazil, and Spain fund this project.

Some DES astronomers don’t like the Chilean location. One recently tweeted, “I didn’t know observing for DES would mean risking my life b/w poisonous spiders, bugs, scorpions, pumas & earthquakes!” Another DES announcement asked why stars that explode “depart so violently. Well, it ain’t the colonel with the candlestick. … We know the perp (a black hole) and its weapon is gravity. … There are a million ways to die in the big city. How many could there be in the dark reaches of the cosmos?”

Other teams include one using the South Pole Telescope—it’s funded by the National Science Foundation—and another using the NASA-funded Hubble Space Telescope. But I’m cheering for my home state team: HETDEX (the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment) should get underway this fall, using one of the world’s largest optical telescopes at its McDonald Observatory site in the very dark Davis Mountains of West Texas.

HETDEX over a three-year period will collect data on at least 1 million galaxies, yielding the largest map of the universe ever produced. (Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has 100 billion stars, or maybe more.) Participating institutions include The University of Texas at Austin (UT), Texas A&M, Penn State, Oxford, and others from around the United States and Germany.

JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING I peeked into the HETDEX locker room at the McDonald Observatory, located 6,600 feet above sea level and 15 miles northwest of a charming town, Fort Davis. Boxes containing 150 spectrographs known as VIRUS—Visible Integral-Field Replicable Unit Spectrographs—were lined up, ready for link-up with the big telescope. The spectrographs will gather light from distant galaxies and split the light into individual wavelengths that will reveal the far stars’ chemical composition and how fast they are moving toward or away from us.

To understand what that project involves, we need to abandon the popular image of an astronomer peering through giant reflecting telescopes like those at McDonald. Many astronomers peer largely at data, numbers on a computer screen derived from starlight bouncing off one mirror to other mirrors to spectrographs that separate light into a frequency spectrum.

(Explanations of exactly how this all works sound like the most famous commercial of another McDonald’s. The fast-food chain unveiled it at the Super Bowl 24 years ago: Larry Bird and Michael Jordan are having a basketball shooting competition that ends with Jordan setting the conditions for a final shot—“Off the expressway, over the river, off the billboard, through the window, off the wall, nothing but net.”)

One of the four UT staffers who stay up all night to supervise use of the amazing apparatus is senior research scientist Matthew Shetrone, 48—with 18 of those years spent at the observatory. He’s on a rotation with three other night owls: four days up all night, 12 days back to day activities. His night work takes place in a windowless room that’s about 20 feet by 30 feet. On his desktop, which can move up or down so he can stand or sit, are computer screens that allow him to direct the positioning of the 120-ton Hobby-Eberly Telescope so it can photograph any one of several thousand targets.

Working alongside Shetrone is a telescope operator who has eight monitors showing whether all the telescope’s mirrors are working together, what the weather is, and other aspects. About once every two weeks a particular motor fails, an amplifier burns out, or some other small problem occurs, and it’s time for a quick fix. Listening is also important: As winds blow, the telescope groans, the aluminum dome pops against the girders, and there’s a howling through the louvers; but if Shetrone or the operator hears some nonordinary noise, they hit a big red emergency stop button.

As the night wears on, staffers can go into a small kitchen just off the main room and microwave something to eat—but Shetrone says he often gets busy doing something and forgets the food is there, so he typically has to warm up food three times. Two coffee machines are available, but none of the night staffers drinks coffee: One joke common among the astronomers, when asked why they don’t get a caffeine fix: “It keeps me up all night.”

Shetrone is married, but his wife “takes whatever sleeping schedule she wants.” He’s excited by the HETDEX project because not knowing what makes up 70 percent of the universe means that “we may be missing something fundamental in our laws of physics, maybe on the grandest scale.” Could the force of gravity or the speed of light change over time? Might there be other universes?

There’s some competition with projects at other telescopes but synergy as well. Some observatories are looking at “local” stars—Shetrone defines “local” as less than a billion light-years away—but HETDEX is emphasizing what is far, far away, and thus looking back to a much earlier time.

To me, it’s all mind-boggling. I was able to peer through midsize McDonald telescopes and get a good look at the Pleiades, a cluster of more than 1,000 stars that the Bible twice (Amos 5:8 and Job 9:9) says God made. In Job 38:31 God challenges Job directly: “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?” God did bind them: The energetic motion of individual stars in that cluster cannot free them from the chains of gravity.

(Other cultures missed God in their explanation of the Pleiades—also called the Seven Sisters because seven stars are most visible to the naked eye—and grew myths. Cherokees spoke of seven boys who would not do their ceremonial chores and wanted only to play, so they ran around and around and rose into the sky. In a Cheyenne myth, a dog in human form visits a chief’s daughter, who gives birth to seven puppies.)

I also viewed additional star clusters: the “dumbbell” or “apple core” nebula, the “double cluster” nebula in the constellation Perseus, and others known as M15 or M35. The ancient Greeks spoke of their gods placing the heroic man Perseus among the stars as a reward for decapitating Medusa and saving Andromeda, a princess chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster: Now through a telescope I viewed Andromeda itself, a huge, distant galaxy about 220,000 light-years across.

Before Galileo in the 17th century saw the Milky Way with its huge number of individual stars, we could believe familiar constellations showed all there is. Before Edwin Hubble in the 20th century, we could think the Milky Way held all the stars in the universe: Then we learned our galaxy is just part of the Local Group of galaxies, which is just part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is just part of something even bigger.

SO WHAT IS MAN, that God is mindful of him? One regular visitor to McDonald is Don Winget, who as an atheist became a tenured UT astronomy professor—but in 2000 he and his wife Karen began coming to Christ. Winget is best-known among professional astronomers for his research that led to a 50 percent downward revision in the mainstream calculation of the age of the universe—to 12 to 14 billion years from about double that.

Winget says when we look at the stars, “God brings up Himself.” He notes that the big-bang theory has discomforted atheists, because astronomical evidence that the universe has a beginning raises the question of Who began it. Study of “black holes” raises the question of believing in something we cannot see. The possibility of life naturally arising in our universe is so infinitesimal that some scientists try to gin up faith in multiple universes.

What we now know scientifically points to a Creator. What we don’t know suggests we should have creaturely humility. Dark energy is a mystery, and here’s another: Galaxies are moving away from each other, but within galaxies stars are orbiting around the galaxy center so fast that it seems stars on the outskirts should fly off—yet they don’t. Astronomers concluded that galaxies must have more gravity-producing matter than we can see. They call that stuff “dark matter” and estimate that such manna is about six times more plentiful than light matter—visible stars and planets.

Galaxies are moving away from each other, but within galaxies stars are orbiting around the galaxy center so fast that it seems stars on the outskirts should fly off—yet they don’t.

Some scientists cite the immensity of the universe as evidence against the Bible’s statement that humans are the crown of creation: Why would such an important drama play out on a small planet revolving around a small sun? A far-out theory these days suggests we are part of a simulation developed by some super-smart gamers in their garages. If such a theory needs any refutation, the enormous expanse that surrounds us argues that we are the handiwork of God: Game designers don’t create programs that use only a tiny amount of their handiwork.

New books are discussing such mysteries. Hugh Ross describes in Improbable Planet (Baker, 2016) the fine-tuning and precise timing that made Earth a home for us, with big planets protecting us from big space debris: The huge size of the universe gives us the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and other elements we need. Peter Bussey’s Signposts to God (IVP, 2016) concludes: “God has set up a universe that is actually big enough to work, big enough to provide a home for creatures such as ourselves. It looks as if such a universe must be very big indeed.”

Young-earth creationists interpret some data differently and propose several theories, but admit that they are taking bites of manna also. As the debate goes on, here’s one certainty: The book of Genesis has not changed. Chapter 15 tells how “the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: ‘Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’… And he brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’”

The total of Abraham’s offspring is now in the billions, but telescopes allow us to see more stars than our forefather could. That number is in the trillions. Sounds like a call for wonder and an impetus to evangelism.