A distant star sheds light on our misinformation highway
Stars illuminate the sky above a rock formation in the Teide National Park in Tenerife, Spain. Credit: Getty Images/Dan Kitwood
Every so often, a piece of information stops you.
Such was the case last week when word came that the venerable Hubble telescope had detected light from the most distant star ever seen.
Now, everything is relative in the world of astronomy, a branch of science specializing in numbers with lots of zeros. But the particular numbers associated with this new discovery were, to borrow from the vernacular, mind-blowing.
This star, says the team of astronomers who found it, is 50 to 100 times more massive than our own sun. Which is impressive until you learn that it also is about 1 million times brighter. Which is really impressive until you learn that its light traveled 12.9 billion years before smacking into Hubble's mirror.
And that gets one thinking about the persistence of light, traveling for 12.9 billion years with no pause for rest or repair. And about everything the light must have "seen" as it passed through that much cosmos, all the other suns and moons and life-forms and civilizations. And about everything that happened here on Earth — the entire arc of our creation, plus the 8 billion years that preceded that — as the light made its epic journey. And about how infinitesimal our existence really is, temporally and spatially, and how humbling that is.
Now, it is true that, as Einstein observed, information is not knowledge. Information must be followed by interpretation to yield knowledge. So, what does this starlight mean? Is it from one star or two? Or three? Is it a black hole? Since it began emitting light closer to the start of cosmic dawn than any star ever discovered, what does it say about the universe itself and its formation?
While learned folk busy themselves with that, we mortals can chew on the new star's name — Earendel, named by Brian Welch, the 27-year-old Johns Hopkins University doctoral candidate who was lead author of the report of its discovery. It's a lovely word, Old English for "morning star," and if it has a ring of familiarity it might be because it comes from the name of a character in "The Silmarillion" by J.R.R. Tolkien, speaking of other worlds.
For a moment, or more than a moment, this information about Earendel provided a lovely respite from the information sewer here at home. The past week was a catalog of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and seven hours and 37 minutes of missing information.
Most intriguing was the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been on the receiving end of disinformation about the state of his war in Ukraine, delivered by his own military advisers — as delightful a bit of turnabout-is-fair-play as one could imagine. But what does it mean? Is it actually true or could it be that U.S. intelligence operatives are inventing their own misinformation to play with Putin's mind?
Revelatory information from a sitting North Carolina congressman, Madison Cawthorn, about cocaine and sex orgies on The Hill turned out to be a lie. A seemingly straight-arrow tech platform, LinkedIn, was called out for disinformation on its site. And partisan battles raged on, especially in state primary campaigns, with all sorts of charges that purported to be informative but only in the sense that they inform you about the character of the informer.
An American mathematician whose heyday was in the middle of the last century, Claude Shannon, once posited that information is the resolution of uncertainty. And it can be. But not necessarily. These days, the point of information often is to create uncertainty.
Which is why when a beam of light arrives from 12.9 billion years ago, you grab hold of the pureness you hope it to be.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
