First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (3 page)

The Hale Telescope, and the three other working telescopes at the Palomar Observatory, are owned by the California Institute of Technology—a place better known as Caltech. Caltech is a small private university located in Pasadena, California. Around the basements and laboratories of Caltech, Jim Gunn and his ilk are sometimes referred to as plumbers. They are also known as the Palomar gadgeteers. They are, in fact, professional astronomers who happen to build their own instruments. Gunn was the plumber for a team of astronomers that had been trying to map the edge of the universe. Such an effort required teamwork, and certainly a plumber. The two other members of the team were Maarten Schmidt, who was the team leader, and Donald Schneider, who was Schmidt’s assistant. The team also had the help of various engineers and programmers, including Barbara Zimmerman.

Gunn was beginning to get frustrated with this job. For three years now the team had been looking for quasars of a certain rare
type. They had not yet found any quasars of this type. Quasars were points of light that glittered in the depths of the universe; cosmic lighthouses. The team wanted to find and map the locations of a few of the most distant quasars. They believed that in doing so they could trace the contour of an otherwise hidden shore: the outer limit of the optically explorable universe. For this particular attempt the team had been awarded four nights on the Hale Telescope in March, when the moon would be down and the Milky Way would be lying flat on the horizon, affording a view of deep sky.

The team had decided to try to doctor the camera on the telescope so that it would scan across the sky, which would speed up the search for quasars. That would be like panning a video camera across a landscape, except that they would pan a telescope across the universe. The Hale Telescope’s camera was an electronic system meant for taking snapshots, not motion pictures. The camera, being full of robotic devices, was controlled by a computer that sat on a floor below the telescope, which needed to be rebuilt for the experiment. The quasar team had hired an engineer named Richard Lucinio to tear down this computer and rewire it. Then, just before the moon waned, Richard Lucinio went to the hospital. In Lucinio’s words, “I had something funky in my stomach, and to this day I don’t know what it was.” Neither did two gastroenterologists, musing over Lucinio’s gut and wondering whether to operate. Meanwhile the computer at the Hale Telescope remained inoperable. The quasar team had been given a chance to use the Hale and they did not want to throw that chance away merely because their computer engineer might be dying. Gunn had no choice but to try to save the experiment with a soldering iron.

Gunn lives in Princeton, New Jersey. He took a taxi to the Newark airport before sunrise. He flew to Los Angeles. He rented a car and drove to Caltech, where he picked up the
J. GUNN
toolbox, and then he headed east and south on Interstate 210. When he arrived at the dome of the Hale Telescope, he went inside the dome and lived there for the next three days, until he had built the kludge.

Gunn turned the kludge over in his hand and contemplated it. It would help the telescope’s camera to talk to its computer. “You
don’t design a thing like this,” he said. “You look and see what you’ve got. Then you build it.” Gunn figured that he could stick it like a limpet to the camera. He figured that if he flipped the toggle switch on the kludge to “scan”—he had written “scan” beside the switch to remind himself which way to throw it—the kludge would transform the Hale Telescope into a motion-picture scanner.

He picked up an object that looked like a flare pistol. He said, “This is an eight-hundred-degree hair dryer.” He aimed it at the back of his hand and pulled the trigger to see if it worked. There was a whir and a smell of burning hair. “Mm!” he said. “It’s working.” He directed the hair dryer at a shrink-wrapped cable emerging from the kludge, and the cable shriveled. Then, picking up a soldering iron, a roll of wiring diagrams, and the kludge, Gunn ran out of the room. Astronomers call a set of nights on a telescope a “run,” and the term is not a metaphor. Gunn took an elevator up one level. He stepped out of the doors of the elevator and onto the main floor of the Hale dome, where stands the largest working telescope on earth.

The Hale Telescope, which is the size of a small office building, was bathed in sodium light, and the light revealed gleams and glints of metal inside the dome. Whether accidentally or on purpose, the Hale dome is almost exactly the size of the Pantheon in Rome. Jim Gunn took a moment, as he often did, to run his eyes over the telescope. He would admit that he could never look up without a sense of disbelief at the last telescope built by George Ellery Hale. “More than slightly mind-boggling,” Gunn would say of it. Then Gunn hurried across the floor and ran up a set of stairs into a steel-mesh cage that hangs from the butt of the telescope. This cage is directly beneath the telescope’s main mirror—a concave mirror made of flame Pyrex glass two hundred inches (sixteen feet, eight inches) across and coated with a reflective layer of aluminum on its upper surface. The mirror has a hole in its center. The concave face of the mirror looks skyward through the tube of the telescope and gleams at night with reflections of stars, like a pool of water resting at the bottom of a well.

Gunn spread his wiring diagrams on the floor of the cage under the mirror. He picked up a flashlight, which seemed to have died. “Dammit,” he growled, rapping the flashlight on the cage. The
bulb glowed a little. He pointed the flashlight around. The floor of the cage was littered with Allen wrenches, alligator pliers, screwdrivers, and rolls of tape. He pointed the flashlight up at a camera plugged into a socket at the base of the telescope, like a shell loaded into a cannon. “That’s 4-shooter,” he said. “It’s been in place a tad more than a year.” 4-shooter is the Hale Telescope’s main camera; Jim Gunn built it.

Gunn clamped the flashlight between his knees and aimed it upward, in an attempt to throw some light on his camera, while he reached up with both hands and grabbed a hank of loose cables. He dredged a Swiss officer’s knife from his pocket, and with it he sliced open a cable. “Gah!” he grunted. He ripped away plastic tissue. “Come on there!” he said, pulling forth a rattail of multicolored wires. He began to graft various wires that were sticking out of the kludge into 4-shooter’s nervous system, using a soldering iron. “On a scale of one to ten,” he suddenly remarked, “this crisis is only a twenty.” He stabbed the soldering iron at a wire and a puff of smoke went up. “I’ve seen things go higher than twenty,” he added. “There is still a happiness at twenty.”

The camera called 4-shooter is a white cylinder, five feet long and two and a half feet in diameter, and it weighs 1,500 pounds. Plugged into the bottom of the Hale Telescope, it pokes through the hole in the center of the mirror. Although the camera is enormous (for a camera), from a distance it looks no bigger than a rivet fastened at the bottom of the Hale. Gunn built this camera from scratch in a Caltech basement known as the Wastebasket, where he received much help and many used parts from certain Caltech engineers and technicians who happen to be experts in the arcana of trash, and who are known collectively as the Wizards of the Wastebasket. In certain ways, 4-shooter resembles a scientific package on a spacecraft: it contains a variety of quartz lenses and mirrors, forests of gold connectors and gold-plated parts, and advanced imaging sensors. In other ways it resembles an outrageous kludge: it contains tangles of stainless-steel plumbing, surplus wires, junk motors purchased at deep discount (for ten cents on the dollar or less), movie projector belts, a broken razor blade, Ensolite foam, piano wire, grease, glue, and small, powdery crystals of dried sweat.

A leading scientific instrument usually remains on the cutting edge of science for a few years, until a better instrument comes along, but the Hale Telescope has been breaking trail into the deep for forty years, principally because of the Palomar gadgeteers. The Hale is no longer the largest telescope on earth—Caltech recently built a larger one, called the Keck Telescope, on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which has a mirror made of glass segments that add up to the equivalent of a four-hundred-inch telescope. The Hale Telescope is, however, world-class. It contains a suite of hypersensitive instruments, of which 4-shooter is one. These instruments, together with the size of the telescope’s mirror, make the Hale one of the best telescopes on earth. The Hale is a masterwork of Depression engineering, the Apollo project of the 1930s. Colossal, welded, gray, aloof, massive, agile, apparently indestructible, and uncompromisingly and magnificently extragalactic, the Hale Telescope stands among all telescopes as the climax of dreadnought design. There will never be another telescope like the Hale, because, in the first place, no amount of money could build the Hale Telescope today, and in the second place, the philosophy of telescope design has changed. A new generation of earth-based telescopes is being built, containing large mirrors hung in airy frames, built more like aircraft than ships. Then there is the Hubble Space Telescope, which is a canister that was tipped into orbit three hundred miles above the earth, from the cargo bay of the space shuttle
Atlantis
. But for the time being, the Hale is the world heavyweight champion. The Hale will likely continue to be regarded as one of the world’s great telescopes until well into the twenty-first century.

The Hale is a versatile telescope. In addition to its two-hundred-inch primary mirror, it contains a total of eleven smaller mirrors that can be moved and angled in order to reflect and condense light into various points inside or near the telescope, where instruments can be placed. The Hale is a refinery for light. It collects a huge amount of starlight and pours it into a minuscule area. When 4-shooter is plugged into the Hale, starlight lands on the Hale’s primary mirror and bounces up to a small secondary mirror (four feet across) at the top of the telescope. The light then bounces downward into 4-shooter, sitting in the hole in the two-hundred-inch
mirror. By the time the starlight enters 4-shooter, it has been narrowed down from a beam two hundred inches across into a beam fourteen inches across. The beam of starlight enters a window in 4-shooter, where it is further shrunk and bounced among mirrors. Finally it lands on four electronic chips known as CCDs. Each chip is the size of a child’s fingernail. In the end, the light that falls on the main mirror of the Hale Telescope—209 square feet of starlight in all—is distilled onto four chips having a total surface area equal to one postage stamp.

The Hale Telescope as drawn by Russell W. Porter in 1939, before the telescope was finished. Even though he could only imagine it in its finished state, Porter captured the grandeur of the Hale. The telescope’s tube is the open structure of girders. The prime focus cage, where an astronomer can sit and stare directly into the mirror, is at the upper left of the picture, at the top of the telescope. The mirror is at the bottom of the tube, lower right. The curved horseshoe bearing is toward the upper right of the picture, profiled against the night sky, which is apparent through the open dome slit. (Photograph courtesy of Palomar/Caltech)

4-shooter is Jim Gunn’s favorite toy. It can take four pictures of the sky simultaneously. These pictures can be joined edge to edge to make a four-paneled mosaic. 4-shooter has taken pictures of newborn stars shining through dust cocoons, and of elderly carbon stars coughing bubbles of hydrogen, and of sheets of gas blown from stars that have exploded and died. The camera has made images of dwarf galaxies, of starburst galaxies, and of elliptical galaxies studded with warty globules of stars. It has unveiled the explosive central nuclei of Seyfert galaxies and has looked into their quasarlike cores, filigreed with sable dust. It has taken snapshots of colliding galaxies flinging away threads of stars as they dance and merge with one another. 4-shooter has exposed supergiant cannibal galaxies feeding upon other galaxies for lunch. 4-shooter has imaged rich swarms of galaxies interorbiting like clouds of gnats, and it has mapped gravitational lenses, which are warps in spacetime that break the light of quasars into double, triple, and quadruple mirages from the dawn of time.

Moving quickly around the cage, Gunn appeared to be a tiny figure fighting a tangle of wires, dwarfed by the immensity of the Hale Telescope. He could not see what he was doing, because he had inherited a set of nearsighted eyes from his father. “I can’t see up close, and I can’t see far away, either,” he would say, explaining that he owned a large collection of Woolworth spectacles of varied magnifying powers that he planted everywhere from Princeton to Caltech to Palomar Mountain in order to have a pair of glasses within reach whenever he needed them, but at the moment he had forgotten to leave a pair of glasses inside the Hale Telescope. He hit a switch.

“Donz,” he called into an intercom. He was calling for his fellow astronomer Don Schneider.

“Greetings,” a voice crackled.

“I need a pair of young eyes,” Gunn said.

A door in the wall of the dome flew open, and Don Schneider ran onto the dome floor and scrambled up the stairs into the cage. In addition to his blond hair and beard, Don had a narrow face and intense, flickering blue eyes. He pulled a wool cap down nervously over his head and said, “It’s going to be chaos tonight.” He stood well back from Gunn’s tangle of wires.