By ASHA THANKI
In the early 1990s, as fighter jets flew over burning oil fields in Kuwait, the star wars of the Cold War relegated to recent memory, astronomers questioned the apparent emptiness of the outer solar system.
By ASHA THANKI
In the early 1990s, as fighter jets flew over burning oil fields in Kuwait, the star wars of the Cold War relegated to recent memory, astronomers questioned the apparent emptiness of the outer solar system. There had been a long-standing presumption that the outer reaches were entirely devoid of the matter—the planets, the asteroids, the moons—that existed in abundance closer to the sun. What if, instead, out in that deep and dark expanse, items existed but only fleetingly? What if the gravitational pull of larger planets cut the lives of smaller objects short? Was it possible that there were more beautiful things to explore? But without the technology or means to prove it, the presumed void remained just that—a void.
In August 1992, my parents were not yet my parents, but my family was slowly being crafted around the not-yet of me. They had their lives plotted out like a constellation, a series of steps to follow to attain their definition of success. A marriage, a move across continents and hemispheres. Job, house, kids. Golden retrievers. All these plans wrapped up like a neat little bundle of ways to make it in America. As my parents plotted the purchase of their first and only house in a suburb of St. Louis, astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu were in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, on top of a mountain, gazing through a 2.2-meter telescope. What they witnessed through that lens changed our understanding of the universe forever: Six months before my older sister was born and brought home to that first and only house, Jewitt and Luu published a paper suggesting that a distant object spotted during their time in Mauna Kea was the inaugural detection of an object beyond Neptune. This object, officially named 1992 QB1, existed in the Kuiper Belt, the heretofore hypothesized home of comets streaming furiously into our world.
The experiment that seemingly affirmed the Belt’s existence almost didn’t happen. In an early moment of doubt, then-graduate assistant Luu had asked the more seasoned Jewitt why they should take on this research project when no one had done a similar one before. Without the mistakes of prior researchers to learn from, the likelihood of success was incredibly minimal.
Jewitt, who, as a graduate student with a why-not attitude, had recovered the path of Halley’s comet for the first time in seventy years, offered what must have been for him a typical response: “Because if we don’t, nobody will.”
I wonder about that moment, about the weight of Luu’s question and the equal but opposite weight of Jewitt’s answer, the depth of a path that hadn’t been previously cleared. When you spend your life pioneering, do you forget to consider the immensity of the task?
Cosmic, adjective. From the Greek kosmikos, which comes from the root kosmos, meaning both order and universe.
Humans once looked to the sky and determined that the apparent emptiness contained a metaphysical sense of order—of rules, of discipline. We expected the void to hand down commandments, to send avatars down to earth, to solve for us what we could not solve. We wrapped our tongues around words that connected the void to gods—celestial bodies both angels and asteroids. We gave it a power that appeared equal parts astronomy, astrology, and religion.
I was raised in a religious tradition with no true concept of Heaven, but I remain fascinated with the language that connects sky to god. To look to the heavens could simply be a desperate plea on a starry night; to see Heaven there is to accept a divinity in those same constellations. My fascination is so great that sometimes I forget what I believe. Sometimes I, too, feel a tug toward the stars, sure their alignment will one day divine the exact time of my wedding, whether or not I am a good match with the person I love. Isn’t it strange that we use that verb, to divine, even as we harbor some sense that the zodiac and fate are disconnected from the mythology of organized religion? Both religion and astrology serve the same purpose; it’s easy to blame my flaws on a god or on my horoscope, on the path that the gods and their stars have placed me on.
My obsession with the Kuiper Belt, with notions of fate and the divine, takes hold decades after Jewitt and Luu’s first glimpse of it on Mauna Kea, as I contemplate questions of who I am, who I’m “supposed” to be, and who I will naturally become. I find myself debating whether to keep my steady job as a consultant or abandon my income to pivot paths and devote myself to writing for three years. To try my hand at the thing I’ve been uncertain of for so long. I want the skies to tell me I am making the right decision.
I’m unsure whether I’m just smitten with the beauty of o