More than Stars…

… are up there in the nighttime skies above you — it’s just that the stars are the easiest to see.

Aside from stars, our galaxy also contains vast regions of dust and gas known as nebulae. Most of these clouds are too dim to be seen by the naked eye, and are known to us only by the long-exposure photographs astronomers take of them. Even seeing these pictures, we may be tricked into thinking that these must be objects deep in space, mere tiny patches in the sky above. For many of them, though, that’s not the case. Take a look at this picture from The World at Night to see what I mean.

In the first image, you see a house with the familiar night sky behind it. Click the small black box in the upper left corner of the image (the right-hand box, not the one with the arrow) to see what that same sky would look like if the nebulae were bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. You’ll see that what looks like empty space interspersed only with stars is actually filled with massive clouds and filaments of dust and gasses. This impressive image is evidence that C. S. Lewis was on the right track when he recorded the ruminations of his protagonist Dr. Ransom in the first book of his space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet:

“[Ransom] had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years he had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it was barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more? No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wise when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory…”