Jul 8, 2022
Observations of Trans-Neptunian Objects
Fiction by Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi
About 120 years ago, during a campaign against the U.S. Army in Cuba, several Spanish soldiers reported seeing a bluish burst in the sky that lasted no more than two seconds. The sun had set, but the sky was fluorescent, likely a chemical byproduct of artillery as the event occurred in the very heat of the Battle of Cienfuegos.
Surviving epistolary accounts suggest that the cosmic phenomenon became central to the lives of those who witnessed it.
Capitán Diego Marin y García wrote in his diary, “As I struggled to release my revolver, I looked up to curse God. There in the eerie twilight, I saw the moon plummeting from its throne, and I realized I did not need a weapon, that God’s purpose for me was to help save the Spanish Army from further destruction. I forgot about the gun and went immediately in search of Comandante Tejerro to tell him of my premonition in the wild hopes that he might raise the white flag.”
Cabo José Somorrostro wrote to his wife, “I lay in a furnace of pain for hours before my company could retrieve me. Whenever the fire in my leg subsided, I thought only of your face, and I could see your eyes so clearly among the faint stars that moved above me. There at last came a moment when I felt certain I would never see you again, but then a bright blue star cut across my field of vision, splitting the sky from the top of San Ignacio Hill to high above the northeast battlements, as if to tell me I was wrong, that I would live and return to you.”
Most astronomers have dismissed these reports as unreliable. All were made during extreme distress (the Spanish were roundly defeated), and the burst might just as easily have been an errant shell or some other debris of war. Additionally, there were no American sightings, and debate has raged ever since over whether the terrain of the battlefield could explain this discrepancy, whether the Spanish side was just delirious, whether the American side was just oblivious, and so on. In a compromise, the alleged comet was given the designation of X, which is used for unverifiable sightings.
Since the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in 1951, Comet 3X/1898 E7 has been considered a possible interstellar object: that is, if it ever existed, it was just passing through the Solar System and is never coming back. I’m alone among the faculty at the University of Central Washington in believing that this is incorrect.
After going to Cuba myself, studying the most likely trajectories, and sifting through endless anecdotal and meteorological records from across the Western Hemisphere, I’m positive that this same comet will be observed again — tonight.
This would change the comet’s classification from X to P, meaning it’s periodic. With an orbital period of about 120 years, it would become the second comet (after Halley’s) that could feasibly be seen twice in one lifetime. If I’m right, I’ll likely have a comet named after me. If I’m wrong, it would be personally embarrassing and would mean another nail in the coffin of my astronomical pursuits.
I say pursuits and not career because I’m not a professional astronomer. I probably look like one at the moment, sitting under the telescope at the Manastash Ridge Observatory in central Washington, passing the time by scribbling contemplations in my notebook. However, my permissions here were a favor from a colleague-of-a-colleague. I would explain the niche branch of ethnoepistemology that I teach at UCW, but that would stretch even the indistinct bounds of this mental excursion. Suffice it to say that my astronomical pursuits are a residual hobby. Still, much important work has been done by hobbyists; even light from a dead star is light. And things never really die, scientifically speaking. They merely develop.
It is a self-centric threshold, that which we humans point to as death. The comet’s existence seems to be at its apex when it’s passing Earth, when it’s visible to us and even impacts human lives. Once it goes far enough into the apparent blackness of space, it is, as far as we’re concerned, gone. But that’s our deficiency (our inability to see it), not the comet’s.
Beginnings are no less deceptive. The oldest light that we can see in the night sky is from when the universe was 370,000 years old, though the energy was always there. You might compare this to your memory of childhood: when you think back to the beginning of your life, you don’t think about your birth because you don’t remember it. I don’t think about my father kissing my mother’s swollen belly before he walked out the door. I don’t think about how they met or how my great-grandparents might have met — any more than I think about the first instant of time, when Comet 3X/1898 E7 and everything that’s ever existed were still united within a single mote of dust. All the countries of the world, all the friends and family we miss who are far away or dead. Not sitting in the same room, but compressed into a space smaller than an atom. Within that pinprick, we weren’t yet the things we would become. We were one thing.
My life as who I am, as far as I’m concerned, began when I was six or seven, playing hide-and-seek with the boys from the neighborhood.
When I remember the town where I grew up, a place I haven’t been for several years now, I think of my comet struggling to curve back and return. Every time it takes a little longer, and every time there’s a little less of it. The universe tends toward separation: it will expand until every atomic particle is an unfathomable distance from its nearest neighbor, dispersed into a uniform and infinite peace. At a certain point, you can’t go home again. Perhaps it’s at that point that you can forgive those who never returned to you.
One of those boys from the neighborhood, my oldest friend, passed away a few weeks ago. An overdose, I don’t even know what of. I don’t speak to anyone back there; I just happened to stumble on a histrionic social-media post about it. The picture they used was from our high-school yearbook. I don’t know anything about his life after we graduated except that he remained in our town, just over the Idaho border. Had he become an addict, one of those emaciated, barely-functional gas station attendants with a constellation of welts on his arm? Or did he own a vibrant breakfast deli, which he ran with a loving partner from Twin Falls, and had simply taken the wrong combination of migraine medication and bourbon one night? How similar would his life have been to mine, and mine to his, if he’d been the one strapped to the shuttle of worldly achievement, and I had decided to stay close to my family?
If I think of him the way humans think of celestial objects, he’s been dead since I went off to college. This boy, who for a short time was like an older brother to me, passed into darkness a long time ago. Life — at least mine — pressed on without him, and will continue to do so.
I’m beginning to suspect that this is what my ramblings have been spiraling toward all along. Of course I should have felt something when I heard the news. And yet I don’t really perceive that anything has changed since he “passed away.” The particles of his body remain somewhere. My friend remains where he’s always been, a web of associations within my mind. But the boy himself, apparently, has somehow vanished. Where has he gone?
What first drew me toward astrophysics was a desire to find meaning in the physical world through observation of it. As a student, I was searching for some objective truth, something tangible and permanent. Having found no such thing in the movement of stars and planets, I turned to philosophy. But, for me, the Why and the How are inextricably tied together, and so I found the wisdom of the ancients just as hollow as the observation of the present. Epistemology, the study of knowledge and belief, shifted my focus away from finding answers to the crafting of more interesting questions. But even once answers have become an obsolete goal, I have to admit that the drive toward finding them never fully goes away.
And so again I look backward, to when everything we know on Earth was the plasma of a star that blew apart 4.6 billion years ago. The disaster left a nebula, a cosmic mess, and as the scattered dust and gas drew back together, it formed our Solar System. Most comets, however, originate in a reservoir of leftover material known as the Oort cloud, which surrounds our Solar System at between 2,000 and 50,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. For scale, Neptune is only 30 times the distance.
It seems rather unfair that some things draw back together and others get discarded. But unfair is just another word for entropic, and by now you must have gathered that we’re just arbitrary clumps of atoms that call themselves people. We might just as easily have been comets or asteroids. My friend, then — his name was William, Will — simply declumped, reverted to a state of non-conscious existence. You and me, we’re not far behind.
That brings us, comet-like, back to our comet.
Cabo Fernando de Rivera y Santiago wrote to his wife from a hospital bed, “Whenever I feel the temptation to let go, to join my brother and my father in the afterworld, I remember that same blue streak flying across my eyes, and I know that it is our child asking me to wait so that he may know his father.”
Presumably, Comet 3X/1898 E7 didn’t travel 120 years just to tell Cabo de Rivera, “Hold on for your unborn child.” And if it had, it would have been exasperated to learn that the soldier died from an infected head wound three days later. But it doesn’t matter what a message says, only what the recipient understands. It doesn’t even matter if there was a message to begin with.
It stands to reason, then, that if I search the heavens for a knowing wink, then the heavens might actually oblige. If I look to Comet 3X/1898 E7 for a sign that all trajectories are parabolic and Will is having but a long layover in some undiscovered country, I could conceivably see it as Cabo Somorrostro saw his wife’s eyes in the stars.
And so, I set my eye to the telescope, anticipating my improbable communiqué. Any moment now, regardless of how statistically impossible the odds: an observer and a trans-Neptunian object, converging in the dark. Seeking each other’s light in the empty spaces of the universe.
