Humans’ Unrelenting Odyssey to Scan the Skies

 

Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the five folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
           ---  Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844-89)  

                         
Ever since humans began fixing their gaze upward and wondered the immensity of the skies in time immemorial, humans’ quest to know the unknown and decipher the secrets of how stars twinkle under the canopy of the dark skies knew no bound. Men of mind recollect from their childhood memories how an English poet Jane Taylor (1783-1924) wondered and penned “----- when the blazing sun is gone/when the nothing shines upon/Then you show your little light/Twinkle, Twinkle all the night..........”. Rising and setting of a blazing sun in the horizons of the sky followed by rising of Moon in the soothing and delightful light in the tapestry of the star-spangled-skies made humans walk the arbour of imagination.

While relishing the beauty of the full Moon with a cluster of dark shadows on its surface which is called ‘Maria’ in scientific term, humans, from time immemorial, imagined a big banyan tree at the foot of which, draped in all whites, a never dying grand old lady in place weaving cloths with a weaving reel in hand for eternity. Humans with poetic ingenuity symbolized  the Moon and its mellow lights as the symbol of love, romance, peace and tranquility, while, contrary to that, a famished man with unbearable hunger-pinch imagined the full Moon as a piece of scorched bread, as poet Sukanto reasoned.

In ancient times, men related the celestial bodies with gods and goddesses who supposedly determined human destiny from the distant skies. A red planet named Mars as seen in the middle of the sky in naked eyes is named after the Roman god of war, while the planet Jupiter is associated with the Roman god and father of heaven. The planet Saturn represents the Roman god of sowing or seed, while the planet Neptune symbolizes the Roman god of water and sea. To everybody's charm and pleasure, Roman goddess of beauty and sexual love, identified with Greek Aphrodite represents the planet Venus which is seen in unaided eyes as a bright star in the western horizon before the sunset. The god of traders is the Mercury, and the god who is equally the husband of planet Earth and father of Titans is the Uranus. Positioned at the furthest edge of the solar system and having, sadly, lost the status of a planet in the planetary system couple of years ago, Pluto is named after a Roman god, giver of wealth.

Humans gaze at the sky and wonder with a constellation of stars assimilating with a sign of interrogation or question mark mysteriously drawn in the vast canvas of the skies forming a constellation of seven stars named Pleiades. In Greek mythology, Pleiades the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas are: Maia, Electra, Taygete, Celaena Aleione, Sterope and Merope. They all fell in love with gods except Merope who loved a mortal. Merope- a faintest star of Pleiades stands at the tail end of the 'question mark' is thought to be ashamed of loving a mortal and hides her face emitting light in the faintest proportion.

In the clear winter skies, humans stare in pensive thought a giant highway supposedly made of milk known as Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon. Our home galaxy, the Milky way measures 100,000 light years across length and the sun lies about 30,000 light years from the centre, is the home of 400 thousand billion stars which makes humans to imagine how infinitesimal our position is, in the immensity of the cosmic ocean where our planet Earth exists no bigger than a size of a microscopic dot; and where we humans and rest of the other species live in.

After Galileo (1564-1642) had invented first telescope in 1609, astronomers' quest to throw vision through the lenses of the telescope deeper and deeper into the space inculcated bringing revolution in the development of high precision telescopes including radio telescopes mounted on high altitude mountain tops in Chile, U.S.A, Russia and other locations across the world. Most spectacular achievement of the 20th century in telescope revolution is the launching of Hubble Space Telescope into low Earth orbit in 1990. It aims at browsing the skies inch by inch traversing into deep space. Discovery of remotest galaxies lying 12 billion light year away from earth by Hubble Space Telescope and other giant telescopes on earth re-writes the theory of big bang actually occurred 13.7 billion years ago instead of 12 billion years, men have reasoned so long.

In the pursuit of learning the mystery of big bang, scientists have already tracked the elusive Higgs-Boson named after Scottish scientist Peter Higgs and Satyandranath Bose of Indian ancestry as dubbed 'god particle' at CERN's large Hadron Collider (LHC) which lies in a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference as deep as 175 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border couple of years ago. It is not out of place to mention, at this point, Peter Higgs passed away just a couple of weeks ago on April 08, 2024, while Satyan Bose died a long time ago on February 04, 1974.

In space exploration mission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) play a leading role. 'Responsible for the civilian space program and aerospace research, NASA was established in 1958 by the US president Dwight D Eisenhower. Since that time, most US space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo Moon Landing Mission, the Skylab space station, and later the space shuttle. Currently NASA is supporting the International space station.' The US president John F Kennedy dreamt of men's Moon landing mission in 1961. His dream came true on 20th July 1969 with historic landing of human on lunar surface. The entire world was thrilled and overwhelmed with joy at men's Moon landing event. As a young man of early twenties, among million others, I was glued to listening the Voice of America's running commentary day and night since the lunar mission began a couple of days earlier and finally heard with inexplicable excitement the landing of lunar module Eagle on the lunar surface and Neil Armstrong's subsequent voice came through radio wave 'a small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind." Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin walked on lunar surface like a 'kangaroo walk' because of Moon's one sixth gravity compared to that of Earth. Both Neil and Buzz passed some moments in collecting the samples of lunar rocks and carried out other scientific experiments and, to the disappointment of many back on Earth, had no time to trace the grand old lady at the foot of grand banyan tree with weaving reel in hand, as they believed and made story out of it to the delight of the children over the ages.

NASA is actively working on setting men's foot on the surface of the planet Mars in the coming years. Martian surface in close proximity of the unmanned spaceship mirrors a giant human face which UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) enthusiast imagine as great art work of the Green Martian, the imaginary inhabitants of the planet Mars who often visit our planet Earth and abduct humans for their laboratory experiments!

It is heartening to note that a couple of years ago, scientists back on earth have traced gravitational waves dating back the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

Humans unending odyssey to unfold the mystery and wonders of cosmic splendor speaks of a most stunning news of the 21st century concerning the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST), launched on 25th December 2021 on an Ariance 5 Rocket from Kouron, French Gyana. JWST is a space telescope designed to conduct infrared astronomy, its high resolution and high sensitivity instruments allow it to view objects too old, distant or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. This enables investigators across different fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observation of the first stars and information of the first galaxies. As stated, having been launched on 25th December,2021 it arrived its destination, a solar orbit about 1.5 million kilometer from earth. The telescope’s first image was released to the public on 11th July 2022 and since then many stunning and breathtaking images of the galaxies and other terrestrial bodies existing billions and billions light years away in the cosmic ocean, have been released to contain the quest for stargazer scientists , standing on the shore of cosmic ocean across the world towards unfolding the mystery of the universe.

Humans' odyssey to scan the skies and savour the wonders of cosmic splendour is unrelenting since dawn of civilization. Astronomers around the world, under SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial intelligence) program, have been constantly browsing the skies in search of intelligent being in the distant stars. Who knows that one day humans' inexhaustible ingenuity will be able to intercept signals from aliens and find a new home for the human race in one of the stars of heaven which apparently looks beyond humans' reach?

German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) said, "It may be that the stars of heaven appear to us fair and pure simply because we are at such a distance from them, and know nothing of their private life."

                        
Mahbubar Rahman is a freedom
fighter and a former civil servant
of Bangladesh government.