Nebula

from Propeller Magazine

At 17, I read a terrifying copy of National Geographic one night before bed. Near the end of the issue, a relatively short article that explained “where stars are born” highlighted photographs the Hubble Space Telescope had recently returned, and featured several unbelievable color images of the Orion nebula.

By way of earning my astronomy merit badge, I was pretty familiar with Orion. You could easily find him near the horizon on most clear nights by locating his belt–three prominent stars that pointed diagonally up through the dark black sky. But despite the previous celestial knowledge I possessed leafing through National Geographic, the very idea that stars could be born and die was surely new to me.

Stars, to my knowledge, were simply balls of light that floated around the planets. Never once had I been told there were things beyond our galaxy, and that no one knew where the universe ended. How could that be possible? Hadn’t scientists been able to predict and/or guestimate how things worked, and when they started, and at the very least, where they ended?

The most frightening aspect of this article about expanding galactic clouds of gas and dust was not necessarily the idea that we didn’t know everything about them. It was the terminology the article used to explain these findings that so disoriented me. “A scattering of stars,” one of the photograph captions read, reaches “across six light-years of space (35 trillion miles).” But light-years only ever appeared in movies and pulp fiction about alien spaceships. Why was National Geographic trading in this language of absurdity? That distance, 35 trillion miles, was deeply confusing. And then it petrified me.

I tried to read on, but I grew further troubled that though I could plainly see it out my bedroom window, we could no in way ever travel to Orion, even in a dozen lifetimes. The terms and conditions of outer space coming to me at warp speed out of the pages of this magazine–the idea that the cosmos is infinitely filled with supernovas and Trapezium stars and stellar ionic winds–worried me so badly that even as a high school senior, I quickly closed the magazine and stuffed it beneath my bed.

I was unable to comprehend “six light-years of space,” and it scared the shit out of me. What I didn’t know then was that this would be my first taste not of science fiction, but of hard, immovable fact: the truth that in the grand, cosmic scheme of things, I’m just a tiny irrelevant being–a disquieting reality that the closing and hiding of a magazine, of course, would never ameliorate.