The most astonishing thing about the universe, in my eyes,
Is not merely its gargantuan, unfathomable size,
But the way its vastness ferries gorgeous, primordial light,
So that as we look up into the night,
The farther afield our gaze penetrates, the higher we climb,
The farther we can see back in time.
Like ancient missives carefully tucked into a bottle,
Flashes of history race towards us full-throttle,
At the speed of light traversing a fabric expanding,
These waves touch our shores, and fuel our understanding
Of quasars and black holes, the light and the dark,
The Very Beginning, the bright cosmic spark
From which all this sprang – upon us, the story rains:
Of how we arose with star stuff in our veins.
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Further reading:
Gigantic Black Hole Discovered from the Dawn of Time, National Geographic
An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30, Wu et al. (2015) Nature
This is one in a series of poems written by Katherine Allen, a researcher in geochemistry and paleoclimate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.
