Mven Mass remembered from childhood the magnificent photographs of the various galaxies that had been obtained by means of electron inverted pictures or by radio telescopes such as the gigantic Pamir and Patagonia installations, each of them almost 400 kilometres in diameter, that penetrated even deeper into the Cosmos. The galaxies, monster clusters of billions of celestial bodies separated by distances of millions of parsecs, had always aroused in him an irrepressible desire to know the laws of their constitution, the story of their origin and their further evolution. The main thing that intrigued every inhabitant of Earth was the possibility of there being life on the countless planetary systems in these islands of the Universe, the question of the fires of thought and knowledge that burned there, of human civilizations in those infinitely distant spaces of the Cosmos.
Three stars appeared on the screen that the ancients had named Alpheratz, Mirach and Almak, (a, ft, y Andro-medae), arranged in an ascending straight line. On either side of this line were the two galaxies close to each other, the Andromeda Nebula or M 31, and the beautiful spiral of M 33 in the Triangnlum Constellation. Mven Mass changed the metal film.
He was now looking at the galaxy known in ancient days as M 51, in the Canes Venatici, 800,000 parsecs away. This was one of the few galaxies that we see “flat,” our line of sight being perpendicular to the plane of the “wheel.” It has a very bright, dense core made up of countless millions of stars from which two spiral arms stretch out, each of them with similarly dense star clusters at the beginning. Their long ends seem to get fainter and more nebulous until they disappear into the darkness of space, stretching for tens of thousands of parsecs from each other in opposite directions. Between the arms, or main branches, there are short streams of stellar condensations and clouds of luminous gas alternating with black “voids,” accumulations of dark matter; the bright arms are all curved like the blades of a turbine.
The huge galaxy NGK 4565 in the Coma Berenices Constellation was a very beautiful one. At a distance of a million parsecs it was seen edgeways. Leaning over to one side, like a soaring bird, the galaxy spread its thin disc, apparently consisting of spiral branches, over a huge area; the central core was a greatly oblate spheroid that burned brightly and had the appearance of a solid gleaming mass. It could be clearly seen that the islands of stars were so flat that the galaxy could be compared to a thin wheel belonging to some clockwork mechanism. The edges of the wheel were indistinct, they seemed to merge into the bottomless void. Our Sun is located on just such an edge of a galaxy together with a tiny speck of dust called Earth that, linked by the power of knowledge with many inhabited worlds, is spreading the wings of human thought over the infinity of the Cosmos!
Mven Mass then switched the projector over to the galaxy NGK 4594 in the Virgo Constellation; this galaxy, also visible in its equatorial plane, had always interested him. It stood at a distance of ten million parsecs from Earth and resembled a thick lentil of burning stellar material wrapped in a layer of luminescent gas. A thick black line, a condensation of dark material, cut the lentil along its equator. The galaxy looked like a mysterious lantern shining out of an enormous abyss.
What worlds were hidden there, in a galaxy whose total radiation was brighter than that of other galaxies and averaged that of an F class star? Were there any mighty inhabited planets there? Was thought there also grappling with the mysteries of nature?
The fact that the huge clusters of stars did not answer made Mven Mass clench his fists. He realized the terrific distances involved — light from the galaxy he was looking at travelled thirty-two million years to reach Earth. Sixty-four million years would be required to exchange information!
Mven Mass selected another reel and on the screen there appeared a big, bright, round patch of light amongst dispersed, faint stars. An irregular black strip cut the patch in two, making the brightly gleaming fiery masses on either side of it still brighter by contrast and thickening towards its ends and overshadowing an extensive field of the burning gas that formed a ring round the bright patch. This was a picture of colliding galaxies in the Cygnus Constellation that had been obtained by the most remarkably ingenious technical set-ups. This collision of giant galaxies, each equal in size to our Galaxy or to the Andromeda Nebula, had long been known as a source of radio emanation, probably the most powerful in the part of the Universe that we could probe. Rapidly moving gas streams of colossal size set up electromagnetic fields of such inconceivable power that they sent out news of the titanic catastrophe to all ends of the Universe. Matter itself sent out this alarm signal from a radio station with a power of a quintillion megawatts. So great was the distance to the galaxies, however, that the picture on the screen showed its state millions of years before. The present state of these two galaxies, passing one through the other, will be known on Earth such a long time after that we cannot say whether terrestrial man will continue to exist so unimaginably long.
Mven Mass jumped up and leaned on the table with both hands so hard that the joints cracked.
Transmission periods of millions of years, covering tens of thousands of human generations and which actually amount to that “never” that is killing to scientific thought, could disappear at the wave of a magic wand — Renn Bose’s discovery and their joint experiment!
Inconceivably distant points of the Universe would be within reach!
Astronomers in ancient days believed the galaxies to be moving apart. The light that reached terrestrial telescopes from distant stellar islands had been changed, light oscillations had lengthened, turning to red waves. This reddening of the light was taken as evidence that the galaxies were receding from the observer. People in the past were accustomed to a direct, one-sided conception of phenomena and they created the theory of a Universe that was moving apart or exploding, not realizing that they saw only one side of the magnificent process of destruction and creation. It was this one aspect — dispersion and destruction, that is, the transition of energy to a lower level in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics — that was conceivable to us and was recorded by instruments constructed to sharpen our senses. The other aspect — accumulation, concentration and creation — was outside man’s concepts because life acquired its strength from energy diffused by the stars, the suns, and our conception of the surrounding Universe took shape on the basis of this. Man’s mighty brain, however, penetrated even into the hidden processes of the creation of worlds and of our Universe. But in those distant times it still seemed that the greater the distance to a galaxy the greater the speed of its motion away from the terrestrial observer. As man penetrated farther into outer space he found galaxies with velocities close to that of light. The end of the visible Universe was the point where galaxies seemed to have reached that velocity although actually no light from them could have reached us and we should not have seen them….
We now know why the light from these galaxies is red. As is usually the case in science there proved to be more than one cause — it is not only due to their recession from us. The only light that reaches us from distant stellar islands is that radiated by their brightest centres. These huge masses of matter are encircled by annular electromagnetic fields that strongly affect light rays, not only by their intensity but also on account of the area they cover; they gradually slow down the light waves until they become longer red waves. In very ancient times astronomers knew that light from very dense stars turns red, the spectral lines shifting towards the red end, so that the star seems to be receding like, for example, the second component of Sirius, the white dwarf Sirius B. The farther away the galaxy, the more centralized is the radiation that reaches us and the stronger the concentration at the red end of the spectrum.