The Stars Have Eyes
How one of astronomy’s greatest images reveals humanity’s fragile ego
An eye. And yet not.
If one can resist the urge to resolve the above image into something so familiar (and so self-reflexive) as an eye, the lasting impression is the way everything glows. This is an apt word, as we shall see later. For now, we must concentrate on the complex network of cloudy matter for its own sake. This is not easy: the intersection of the central circle and the overlying spheroid is so dominant, constantly creating the illusion that immediately beguiled us. And what an illusion: doubled in impact in the way it seems to be looking back at us.
The palette is gentle. We struggle not to conjure up adjectives like “opalescent”, “pearlescent”, and “iridescent”. Colours segue from the central cool indigo to creamy pinks and oranges, finally tapering off into warm copper and russet at the edges. The surrounding ring — the eye’s “iris” if you must — is fantastically detailed, an array of tiny comet-like structures, fanning out in all directions as they border the central disk. On further inspection, we are reminded of life again: they could be so many spermatozoa swimming towards an egg.
It is the background sprinkling of bright dots that will disabuse us of the fact that we are observing animate matter. The dots are, in fact, stars, and we are looking one of the most famous photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a gaze 700 light-years back through the constellation of Aquarius, to the remnants of a dying star known properly as the Helix Nebula. “Helix” is a prettier word than the nebula’s catalogue name — NGC 7293 — but this pales in comparison to its most famous moniker: The Eye of God.
This astral “eye” is enormous: 25 trillion kilometres across. If it were visible to our own, real, naked eyes, the Helix Nebula would cover a patch of sky roughly the same size as the full moon. It is a textbook example of pareidolia, which is not a rare skin disease or a village in Greece. It is “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist” (Collins’ Dictionary). And it is integral to human nature.
It is the reason we can see a face on the Moon or an image of Jesus on toasted bread. The Helix Nebula is championed by both science and religion: “scientific” creationists frequently cite it as proof of Intelligent Design; astronomers have scrutinised it since its discovery in the 1800s and gleaned valuable information about the life cycles of stars.
The iconic Eye also turns out to be an elusive one: some of its most detailed delineations are found in infra-red photographs, capturing a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum we cannot actually see. (Some creationists might feel cheated by this fact.) In other conditions, the Helix Nebula appears as an altogether different beast, so much so that Tolkien enthusiasts have called it not the eye of the Judaeo-Christian deity but that of Sauron.
Pareidolia abounds in astronomy. Among the Helix’s fellow stellar dust clouds you will find a Tarantula, an Eskimo, a Crab and a Horsehead. As galaxies go, there are Cigars, Sombreros, Whirlpools, Pinwheels and even a Death Star.
The world of inner space is not spared either. Two tendons in the human hand make up a Snuffbox, the three bones of the inner ear are called the Hammer, Anvil and Stirrup, and, folded deep inside our brain, hides the hippocampus, or Sea-Horse. The hippocampus remains an enigma to neurologists. We know, though, that it is a place where emotion and sensation dovetail (dovetail being an appropriately verb): exactly what happens when we stare at an image NGC 7293 and happily suspend our disbelief. It is neither the first nor the last stellar object that has caused astonishment and awe in both scientists and poets, hinting that the supposed unease between the Two Cultures of science and the humanities is eroding, and happily so.
Like all planetary nebulae (so called because their first observers thought, incorrectly, that they were planets) the Helix came about because of the death of a star. It turns out the Eye is nothing more than a cloud of glowing gas ejected across incredible distances by a sun entering its death throes. Beyond the Helix’s captivating appearance there is something poignant about this, for it was a star very much like our own Sun, and gives a hint of what will become of it when it burns out in 5 billion years’ time. There is something poetic about the idea that, when that day comes, our former location might be a source of incredible beauty for a civilization looking out at it from a great distance. (What might we look like to them? A tree? A face? An octopus? The possibilities for pattern recognition are endless.)
Pondering the death of stars is sobering, given that we consider them to be constant and ageless. 10 billion years — the estimated lifespan of our Sun — seems forever compared to a human life. But in these deaths lurk the very source of life. Stars are giant atomic factories, forever compressing hydrogen into heavier elements. For most of their lives they stop at fusing single protons into helium, which is only the second element on the Periodic Table (which now tops out at over 118 members). In the age of a planetary nebula, enough energy is consumed to produce, among others, carbon atoms. And all life as we know it is based on this element (that, paradoxically, appears so lifeless and inert its native form: coal, soot, graphite, even diamond). We were not so wrong to consider the Eye of God as living after all.
We might liken NGC 7293 to the eye of an eternal deity, but it was formed roughly 10 000 years ago, recent enough to tie it to the dawn of human civilization. Put another way, the Helix Nebula is as old as we are. It is now middle-aged and its clouds of gas will dissipate into the terrifying cold of interstellar space in a couple of millennia’s time, for the second law of thermodynamics (where all energy eventually reverts to its lowest state) is inviolate. By that time humanity may have conquered other worlds, or, if the current trend in dystopian science fiction is to be believed, annihilated itself.
The great Eye turned blind, the core of the former star will endure. For now, we can allow it to look back at us as we enjoy the sleight of hand our brains force onto our experience. Call it by its catalogue number, formal moniker, or whimsical comparison, this object will continue to entice for it is at once so far away from our sense and yet so close to our sensibility. For we look back. And that is an act that defies any distance.
