I know a lot of stuff. Mostly that’s because I read a lot, and I like learning. When I was a kid — and even now, I’ll admit — a part of that is simply ingesting information, sometimes without as much context as it should have. In those cases, you might know something, but you don’t know why it’s something. But that bit of info you do know might be interesting enough that you want to learn more; it forms a seed that can grow into knowledge. Understanding.

A big part of that is not keeping those facts in isolation, but being able to make connections between them^* .

It’s not always easy; sometimes the connections are obvious, and sometimes they’re more subtle. And sometimes you have all the info you need but you’ve simply never put it all together.

I just experienced that, and it was pretty cool.

I was working on an article for Scientific American last week about meteor camera networks; automated cameras that photograph meteors as they appear in the sky. I was brainstorming topics I wanted to cover in the article, and one bit was about taking spectra of meteors — breaking up their light into individual colors so that their compositions can be found. I’ve written about this topic before, notably in an old SYFY article from 2020. A bright fireball occurred over Spain, and a network of cameras was able to obtain spectra. Surprisingly to me at the time, one of the brightest features in the spectra was from sodium (yup, half of the ingredients of table salt). It’s not terribly abundant in meteoroids (the solid bit of material that burns up to create the bright meteor), but sodium is very enthusiastic about emitting light, and does so at a lower temperature than other elements like silicon and calcium, so it shows up first as the meteor heats up.

So that’s one thing I knew. I also knew that they burn up about 80 – 100 kilometers above Earth’s surface. On top of that, I knew that there’s a thin layer of sodium that persists at that height, which would dissipate rather rapidly except that it’s replenished by the 50 – 100 tons of meteors that burn up in our atmosphere every day.

So look at all that information I knew, and could put together! I must be smart! S-M-R-T. Smart.

But there’s another thing I knew. Our atmosphere is unsteady, with little parcels of air blowing to and fro. These act like little lenses, bending incoming starlight and making it appear as if the stars are dancing — what normal people call twinkling, but astronomers for some goofy reason confusingly call seeing. Anyway, this blurs out images of astronomical objects, smearing them out in a way that makes it hard to see fine details. It also limits how faint an object you can see, because the light gets spread out, making something look dimmer. 

One way around that is adaptive optics. Astronomers find a bright star near their target and carefully (and extremely rapidly) measure how the seeing affects it. This movement can then be compensated using deformable mirrors, essentially counteracting the dancing light. Objects can be much sharper. We’re so good at this that ground-based telescopes now rival or even can exceed the sharp vision of Hubble and JWST.

But what if there’s no bright star near your object? How do you deal with seeing then?

One way is to make your own star! An artificial one, by using powerful lasers. If you pick the right color for your laser, when you shine it in the sky it excites elements high enough up that they emit light brightly, and are so high up they appear as tiny points. Boom! A bright artificial star you can track.

What element works well? Turns out sodium is perfect. It emits a lot of light when you zap it, and there’s a handy and persistent layer of it right there about 90 km up. Perfect for faking your own star.

So I knew all this as well. But what I didn’t realize until just now, what I never put together before, is that that sodium layer we use to fine tune our observations comes from meteors burning up in the atmosphere. 

We’re using astronomical objects — meteors — to better observe astronomical objects. Or, more succinctly: We’re using shooting stars to shoot stars.

How awesome is that?

Somehow I had all that info bumping around in my head, and never put it all together to make this realization. In hindsight it seems obvious, but I didn’t think of one thing at the same time as the other, so they never connected. It wasn’t until I wrote about meteor camera networks that all that stuff in my skull collided.

It was a very cool aha moment.

It was also a funny self-realization. I don’t know if this sudden eureka makes me smart because I figured it out, or not smart because it took me so long to figure it out. Maybe it’s both.

I know people who are very, very good at collating all the info in their heads. Randall Munroe always comes to mind; if you read his xkcd comic (and if you don’t, WHAT) you quickly realize he’s a genius: he knows a lot of stuff, and he is extremely adept at connecting it all. My wife is the same way; she’s an extraordinary gardener and knows vast amounts about plants, but she can also make the connections needed to understand not just what they are individually but also their ecosystem, how they interact. She’s that way with cooking, too, which my taste buds are quite thankful for.

Anyway, if there’s a lesson here, it’s to think about things, and when you do, try to think of other related things that might connect with it. You never know what will happen, except in the proximate case you might learn something, and in the more far-reaching case you can train yourself to ponder things differently, to get more adept at fitting the pieces together. I think that’s a pretty smart idea.

* Yes, obviously, this is vastly simplifying a vastly more complicated topic. I’m not trying to define intelligence here (I’m quite sure I can’t) so much as focus on one aspect of it. This is tricky territory, which is why I’m simplifying, but hopefully not oversimplifying.

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!