BAN #388: The Stochastic Journey

Personal Stuff

Yeah, but not too personal

It’s the end of the year, and while I’m generally not one for arbitrary beginnings and endings and the ruminations thereof, I was thinking about this recently and now is as good a time to write those thoughts down as any.

I follow the telescope manufacturer Celestron on Twitter (I’ve used their products for many years, and they sponsor Science Getaways, the science vacation company my wife and I run). Earlier this month they posted this:

I quote-tweeted it, noting that I studied this very object for my Master’s Degree.

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before in the newsletter (issues 358 and 36), and written countless articles about planetary nebulae — formed when stars like the Sun die and blow off their outer layers — but I have never mentioned how I came to love these objects so.

I observed quite a few of them with my own telescope when I was a kid. They appear as faint, ghostly, and usually greenish disks in the eyepiece. Some have really interesting shapes, like the Ring Nebula, and the Dumbbell Nebula, so they’re fun to look at. I kinda sorta understood what formed them back then, though the physics was way beyond me (I was in high school, after all).

Generally speaking they weren’t objects of hot interest to astronomers. I don’t mean people ignored them, it’s just that they weren’t the sexy new thing at the time, so they were studied but it was just another subfield of astronomy.

Fast forward to grad school. In the second year of study students are required to start their Master’s Degree research. That usually entailed a very specific bit of research, nothing too grand or complex, necessarily, so that it could be done in a year or two. When it was time for me to start looking I was floundering around for a topic.

What would I study? I came up with an observing project but it turned out to be untenable; it couldn’t be done well with our equipment on the timescale of a Master’s.

But then I got lucky.

The astronomy department at UVa, as most do, had a colloquium series where guest speakers from other schools would come and talk about their research. We also had a one-credit class linked to it, where we’d read a paper by the speaker on the topic they were presenting. This helped us understand the talk, as well as learn about how to write and read scientific papers. Very useful.

One day, Bruce Balick from the University of Washington was the guest speaker, and his topic was — yup — planetary nebulae. Reading his paper, something happened in my brain. I understood this topic. Like, really understood it, just grokking what I was reading as if I had studied it for years. It was a weird feeling, but a welcome one, as most of the topics we read about were pretty opaque.

Bruce gave his talk the next day after our class, and again the grokking happened. I assimilated his research as he spoke, like drinking from a water fountain with exactly the right flow.

My journal class instructor, Noam Soker, took note of my enthusiasm and told me he researches planetaries, and would I like to work with him for my degree?

I said yes, of course. We came to look into the idea of giant outer haloes of gas around bright nebulae. I looked into which ones were up high enough to observe that time of year, made a list, observed them, and NGC 6826 was the only one where we could clearly (or clearly enough) see the halo. I worked really hard, wrote the degree, published it as a paper, and was able to move on to my PhD research (which oddly enough, was studying an object much like a planetary nebula in many ways).

Seeing that tweet by Celestron reminded me of all this. Coincidentally, not even a month earlier, his name had come up in some completely different research I was doing — he was one of the folks who discovered Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy — so I sent him a note thanking him for his impact on me, and he gave me a gracious reply. It was lovely.

I’ve had an extremely fortunate life, I know. Privileged, many would call it. Fair enough; I’ve admitted to my privilege before. But even so I sometimes marvel at the wonderful coincidences and fortunate happenstances that have had such major impacts. This is true for everyone, all the time, but sometimes that impact looms larger. In this case, Bruce happened to be giving a talk when I had a class on journalism taught by someone in the same field at a time when I needed a topic quite quickly. Happenstance upon happenstance. But that confluence of events shaped my life for years — decades — to come.

It was happenstance that I decided to do more public outreach about astronomy, and happenstance that an astronomer with influence in the media literally happened to walk by me as I worked after hours at a job one night prepping for a talk; shortly thereafter he recommended me for an interview with CNN about an asteroid, and that launched my media career. He also helped me get my first book published, due to yet more happenstance.

I wrote the books, started the blog, started the newsletter, and, well, here we are.

All of this flew into my brain the other day as I thought about what to write for this year-end BAN issue. All these coincidences that make up our lives, all these random bumps and pushes and pulls that lead us this way or that. My own random walk has taken me through some amazing places and events along the way, and I’m glad I’m afforded the opportunity to thank those who became inflections points in my life.

And so this stochastic journey (both in life and in telling this story) has brought me to this:

I don’t know how any of you happened to find my work; maybe through Twitter or the pictures I post on Instagram or the occasional TV show on which I do the talking head thing. But I’m glad and grateful your random walk and mine have intersected. I enjoy writing this newsletter, and it amazes and humbles and emboldens me knowing that there are people out there who will give real money to read what I write, and help support me to continue this endeavor.

So, as the Earth completes another mild ellipse around the Sun, as we flip our calendars, and as we take account of all we’ve been and seen and done, let me end my own year by simply saying: Thank you. I truly appreciate your support, and it will propel me to continue writing these issues hopefully for years to come. There’s still much to say and do.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!