THE STARS LOOK VERY DIFFERENT TODAY
Tuesday night, a friend of mine took me to a hot spring. A hot spring that will remain unnamed and un-located, lest I be run out of this one-horse town.
The water cooler talk amongst us strangers in the tub—or should I say, water heater talk—was what you would expect, given the phenomenon of last weekend: Where people had seen the best colors out of the aurora. What those colors had been, and how they’d flared. The better striations of colors they’d seen in years and places long past.
One man said that he was from the western part of Canada. That he’d had a lifetime of more spectacular geomagnetic storm sightings, prior to moving to California.
(Or, I believe that’s the gist of what he’d said. He’d come from up north, but he was without a stitch of clothing, south of the naval. I could only begin listening, in earnest, when the shock factor wore off.)
But the best lights he’d ever seen, he said, were no northern lights at all. He said that when he was a man “our age” he’d gone backpacking on New Zealand’s South Island. He and his buddy had haplessly stumbled into a valley meadow and been witness to the southern lights which, according to the man, had really been quite something.
This Aurora Australis, as it’s called, differs from its northern brother, the Aurora Borealis (what we saw) because of how the sun squeezes Earth’s magnetic tail.
That was all we caught before the guys sitting next to us began bemoaning, loudly, the travesty of Mammoth gas prices and the racket they could run, should they begin a below-the-table shuttle service out of town to Vegas.
We were brought back down to earth.
Still, it was a rare night when the company you keep talks about all the right stuff. Where all things add up to one. Where all you have to do is shut up and listen.
Because earlier that night, I got to attend Dr. Bonnie Buratti’s lecture at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (SNARL).
Let me begin by saying, what a get for SNARL—Dr. Buratti is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA and a fellow at their Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Tuesday night, she presented her current work as the Deputy Project Scientist for the Europa Clipper mission—Earth’s “first mission to conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.”
And let me follow that by offering a disclaimer for the summary I am about to provide of Dr. Buratti’s research. She has a PhD in Astronomy and Space Sciences from Cornell. In college, I majored in a language I already spoke. But here goes nothing:
The mission, scheduled for launch in October of this year, will explore Europa—the moon, named for the lover of Zeus in Greek mythology and one of four Galilean moons discovered by Galileo Galilei, believed to harbor a salty subsurface ocean beneath its icy shell. Straight from the horse’s mouth, Nasa believes Europa to be “one of the most promising places in our solar system to find present-day environments suitable for some form of life beyond Earth.” Besides its cracked icy surface, it’s got a few impact craters, and significant evidence of geologic activity—features which suggest a relatively young and dynamic surface.
Over the course of its mission, the spacecraft will collect scientific observations during 49 planned flybys to get a sense of the moon’s potential habitability. The historical context of the Europa Clipper’s search for life is rooted in the famed Urey-Miller experiment which showed that amino acids could be produced from inorganic compounds, and takes over from the current hypothesis that life can arise within deep ocean hydrothermal vents. If that’s true, similar conditions might exist beneath Europa’s icy crust.
Life, NASA hopes, has found a way 390 million miles away from planet Earth.
And I don’t know what kind of prescient data the good scientists have at NASA, but Buratti’s lecture was a timely one, referencing last weekend’s geomagnetic phenomenon.
Because the whole reason scientists have faith in this salty, subsurface ocean on a far off moon is because Europa has an induced magnetic field—a direct result of interacting with Jupiter’s strong planetary magnetic field. Dr. Barotti explained that tidal heating, caused by Europa’s gravitational interaction with Jupiter, generates the necessary energy to maintain this subsurface ocean in a liquid state.
Dr. Barotti also explained that Europa’s magnetic field interactions with Jupiter’s is similar to how Earth’s magnetic field interacts with charged particles to create the Aurora Borealis.
Auroras, then, are simply visible manifestations of interactions between a planet’s magnetic field and solar wind particles. On Earth, these interactions occur in the upper atmosphere near either pole, producing light displays like the one we just saw. Similarly, the magnetic interactions between Jupiter and its moons, including Europa, lead to complex electromagnetic phenomena. As it pertains to the Europa Clipper mission, understanding these magnetic interactions is vital for assessing the moon’s habitability and detecting any signs of active geology or plumes that could indicate ongoing processes beneath the icy surface.
And here’s another thing you probably didn’t know.
As part of her tenure, U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, wrote a poem that has been etched onto the vault of the Europa Clipper, and will travel with the spacecraft on its yearslong journey to the Jupiter System. It’s called In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.
An excerpt below:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
Back in the tub, there was talk of meteor showers seen and missed. The ideal bit of the midwest for experiencing the totality of April’s solar eclipse. The idiot Angelenos, who mistake Elon Musk’s Starlink for something more sinister (I kept my mouth shut, never having seen Starlink myself. Heaven forbid I be lumped in with the LA crowd).
“No one looks up anymore,” said the girl sitting next to us. Presumably, she was the girlfriend of one of the gentlemen who believed, fully, in the price gouging scheme of a nonstop car service to Vegas.
And I thought that was funny. Three women in one evening—the rocket scientist, the poet laureate, and the hot spring dipper—saying much the same thing. Above us, there are answers for the taking; answers for so much of that which we are curious about. But we must be tenacious in our searching for them. Lucky is he who stumbles into a valley, and finds something spectacular.
We left the hot spring soon after. In this week of heavenly bodies, with their colored lights all put away, the star dust settled on us as we made our way back to the car.
