Putting the Galaxies in Their Place by James Hanna

Phineas Ford was an astronomer of remarkable skill and vision. He was also a bachelor with meticulous habits from which he never wavered. For breakfast, he always ate a soft-boiled egg and two pieces of lightly-buttered toast. For lunch, he routinely devoured a cucumber sandwich and six potato chips. At precisely three p.m. each afternoon, he took his exercise, which consisted of a three-lap stroll around a local park—never more nor less. His dinner always consisted of corned beef and cabbage with bread pudding for dessert, and on Sunday he permitted himself a single glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. At precisely six p.m. each evening, he watched two episodes of Downton Abbey, and when he had finished the series, he watched it over again. At exactly ten p.m., Phineas retired to his bed, but not before reading a chapter of Anna Karenina while puffing on his pipe. He had read Anna Karenina fifty times because he never read anything else, and the book was so worn from handling that the pages were falling out. When his housekeeper one day asked him why he never changed his routine, he said, “You can’t improve on perfection, kiddo, so why would I bother to try?”

It was surely due to the simplicity to which he had reduced his domestic life that Phineas was able to focus entirely on exploring the universe. As an affiliate member of NASA, he acquired a government grant and built a remarkable observatory in the backyard of his suburban house. The observatory included the most advanced of wide-imaging equipment and a super-sensitive spectrograph to break down ultraviolet light. The telescope itself weighed twenty-five tons and was a hundred feet in length, which made it twice as big as the overrated Hubble telescope.

Using this instrument, Phineas one day spotted the mother of all galaxies, a distant but infinite cluster of stars of a size he could not believe. After documenting his sighting and triple-checking his stats, Phineas was eager to share his discovery with the world. At the annual astrophysics conference in Zurich, Switzerland, Phineas presented his finding to a mounting chorus of gasps.

“Dear colleagues,” he said, “this new galaxy is fifteen billion light-years away, which explains why we have had no record of it until today. It is a million light-years in diameter and is expanding at such a rate that if we started in its center with a spacecraft traveling a hundred and fifty thousand miles per hour, in a million years, we would be further from its edge than when we started out. It contains not billions of suns as does our paltry Milky Way, but trillions upon trillions, many of which are forming as I speak. So incredible is the size of this monster that I suspect it was formed by a merger of ten or twelve galaxies each no smaller than our own. As a whale might swallow a dolphin, this galaxy could swallow the Milky Way, and I dare say that in doing so, it would not even emit a burp.”

“What have you named this colossus?” one of the astronomers in attendance asked, conceding to Phineas the right of an explorer to name his discovery.

Phineas grinned like a possum and said, “I call this new galaxy Max.”

Max seemed like too common a name for the mother of all galaxies, and some conference members suggested that it be called Ultimus Maximus instead. But Phineas would not consider a less pedestrian name, so this incredible concentration of stars became known as the Max Galaxy.

It eventually proved fitting that Phineas had not given Max a more prominent name, because a year later, he discovered a galaxy that put even Max to shame. The sheer size of this new body of stars so overwhelmed Phineas’ senses that he collapsed on the floor of his observatory and wept like a newborn child. It took Phineas a week to recover his wits to the point that he could chart his new find, but after a month, he had put together a collection of figures and slides. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in New Orleans, Phineas presented his finding in a voice that trembled like a flame.

“Esteemed colleagues,” he stammered, “I begin by saying that Isaac Newton claimed that he saw himself as a child on a seashore diverted by pretty shells while the mighty ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. Now let me say that this new mass of stars is so infinite and dense that it unquestionably constitutes the mighty ocean of truth. This galaxy is twenty billion light-years from the edge of our Milky Way, and only by tweaking my telescope to five times its original strength was I able to finally get a naked look at it. It is ten million light-years in diameter and expanding at such a rate that a spacecraft traveling fifty miles a second could not keep up with it. And if you were to count every grain of sand in the mighty Sahara Desert, this could constitute less than a fiftieth of the suns this monster contains. And the comets, oh the comets! They streak across the void like fireworks constantly celebrating the most incredible work of God.”

“So, what will you call this phenomenon,” one of his dazzled colleagues asked.

“I’m going to call it Sam,” Phineas replied.

Since this new mass of stars had upstaged Max as the mother of all galaxies, a few in attendance requested that Phineas give it a nobler title. “Can we use the name Ultimus Maximus now?” this handful of purists asked, but Phineas insisted that Sam would be its name.

Phineas won the Nobel Prize for physics and used his cash award to extend the length of his telescope to a hundred and fifty feet. With its powerful lenses, he discovered a galaxy that made his previous findings seem as incidental as table salt and as stale as week-old bread. So massive was this galaxy, so endless was its girth, that two hundred Milky Ways placed side-by-side would not have exceeded its width. After spending a week in a sanitorium, recovering from his shock, Phineas introduced this colossus to the International Astrophysics Conference in Turin, Italy.

“Fellow scientists,” he said. “Let me begin with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Like the jerks in the cave, I have spent my life watching shadows cast upon stone and I have afforded these shadows a veracity they have not earned. But now I have stumbled out of the cavern and stepped into the light, and I stand before you as a dilettante who has nonetheless found his true sight. My previous discoveries are nothing compared to this stunning galaxy. It’s fifty billion light-years from our Milky Way yet its blaze has seared my soul and its ever-forming stars are so numerous that if you were to count them ten at a time, I assure you that your count would never, ever end. And if you tried to transverse it, traveling at a hundred miles a second, it would leave you in its wake even after a trillion years of flight. Gentle colleagues, I shake when I think of the civilizations this cosmos must have spawned. I would number them in the billions by the most conservative estimate—inhabited worlds that flourished then died throughout the march of time and will forever hold their mysteries from us because they can never be reached. And now I must hang my head and weep for I can speak no more. The impact of what I have witnessed has numbed me to my core.”

“And what will you name this galaxy?” a newspaper reporter cried.

Phineas thought for a moment. “Gigi,” he replied.

Later that month, Phineas was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and as he stood on the stage, the president asked him a most enduring question. “Mister Ford,” he said, “your discoveries have exceeded all speculation. Tell us why you chose to give them such uninspiring names.”

Phineas winced aggressively as though someone had swiped his pipe. “You have to be methodical,” he said, “when you’re venturing into space. Those galaxies are too big for their britches, so they had to be put in their place.”

James Hanna

Image: A vision of the galaxy with millions of stars and planets in red ad pink and gold against a black background from Pixabay.com