Cosmic Connection Read Free Page A

patterns in the sky.
    In the Book of Judges there is an account of a slain lion discovered to be infested by a hive of bees, a strange and apparently pointless incident. But the constellation of Leo in the night sky is adjacent to a cluster of stars, visible on a clear night as a fuzzy patch of light, called Praesepe. From its telescopic appearance, modern astronomers call it “The Beehive.” I wonder if an image of Praesepe, obtained by one man of exceptional eyesight, in days before the telescope, has been preserved for us in the Book of Judges.
    When I look out into the night sky, I cannot discern the outline of a lion in the constellation Leo. I can make out the Big Dipper, and, if the night is clear, the Little Dipper. I am at a loss to make out much of a hunter in Orion or a fish in the constellation of Pisces, to say nothing of a charioteer in Auriga. The mythical beasts, personages, and instruments placed by men in the sky are arbitrary, not obvious. There are agreements about which constellation is which–sanctioned in recent years by the International Astronomical Union, which draws boundaries separating one constellation from another. But there are few clear pictures in the sky.
    These constellations, while drawn in two dimensions, are fundamentally in three dimensions. A constellation, such as Orion, is composed of bright stars at considerable distances from Earth and dim stars much closer. Were we to change our perspective, move our point of view–with, for example, an interstellar space vehicle–the appearance of the sky would change. The constellations would slowly distort.
    Largely through the efforts of David Wallace at the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, an electronic computer has been programmed with the information on the three-dimensional positions from the Earth to each of the brightest and nearest stars–down to about fifth magnitude, the limiting brightness visible to the naked eye on a clear night. When we ask the computer to show us the appearance of the sky from Earth, we see results of the sort displayed in the accompanying figures: One for the northern circumpolar constellations, including the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Cassiopeia; one for the southern circumpolar constellations, including the Southern Cross; and one for the broad range of stars at middle celestial latitudes, including Orion and the constellations of the zodiac. If you are not a student of the conventional constellations, you will, I believe, have some difficulty making out scorpions or virgins in the picture.

    We now ask the computer to draw us the sky from the nearest star to our own, Alpha Centauri, a triple-star system, about 4.3 light-years from Earth. In terms of the scale of our Milky Way Galaxy, this is such a short distance that our perspectives remain almost exactly the same. From α Cen the Big Dipper appears just as it does from Earth. Almost all the other constellations are similarly unchanged. There is one striking exception, however, and that is the constellation Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia, the queen of an ancient kingdom, mother of Andromeda and mother-in-law of Perseus, is mainly a set of five stars arranged as a W or an M, depending on which way the sky has turned. From Alpha Centauri, however, there is one extra jog in the M; a sixth star appears in Cassiopeia, one significantly brighter than the other five. That star is the Sun. From the vantage point of the nearest star, our Sun is a relatively bright but unprepossessing point in the night sky. There is no way to tell by looking at Cassiopeia from the sky of a hypothetical planet of Alpha Centauri that there are planets going around the Sun, that on the third of these planets there are life forms, and that one of these life forms considers itself to be of quite considerable intelligence. If this is the case for the sixth star in Cassiopeia, might it not also be the case for innumerable millions of other stars in the night