The last time I peered through my father’s telescope was in February 1986. We were in our driveway in Palos Verdes, which juts out into the Pacific and is 18 miles south of the glare of downtown Los Angeles—far enough away that you can see the sky when you look up.
Halley’s Comet was racing toward its perihelion—the point in its orbit at which it is closest to the sun—at about 122,000 miles per hour, or 34 miles per second. It looked like a small, silver-gray smudge.
We had only a few hours until the smudge would disappear for another 76 years. I was 13, and it was possible that I would see it again, if I made it to 89. My father was 44. “The accident of the years of our births,” he said quietly.
He had built the telescope when he was 15 in his parents’ apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and lugged it to medical school in Syracuse and then Boston and Pittsburgh and eventually southern California.
He thought about space the way he thought about mathematics or analytic philosophy or the Torah or Mozart’s twentieth piano concerto, which he sometimes played at night when my sister and I were going to bed. It was beautiful and complex and infinite, and how could you not want to explore that, know where it came from, know where we came from?
We will soon know a little more thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA blasted into space on Christmas 2021 and is now about 1 million miles from Earth, revolving around the sun.
A few months ago, the space telescope hoovered up several as-yet-unreleased images of K2-18b, an exoplanet—meaning a planet outside our solar system. K2-18b is 120 light-years from Earth and, importantly, resides in the habitable, or Goldilocks, zone around the star it orbits. Not too hot, not too cold, it may be just the right temperature for an Earth-like atmosphere that might—might—include life.
