The Distance Between Earth And The Nearest Star

If the Earth was a marble a small boy was playing with, the distance between Proxima Centauri and the that marble would equal the distance between that boy and his father, a soldier in Iraq whom he barely knows.

A Pulsar

For the Millions of Pulsing Stars

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, when the universe was much wilder and younger, there lived a pulsar. The pulsar lived in its own little corner of the universe and was completely alone. Now, when I say “lived in its own little corner of the universe” I do not mean that the pulsar was literally in a corner of the universe. Science has shown us that the universe actually has no corners, but simply goes on and on and on until you get back to where you started. And no, it is not round like the earth. It is actually four-dimensional. To put it simply, it is completely beyond our current understanding. In fact, modern astronomical science is completely beyond the grasp of humans; even to those who study the skies for a living. We may discover certain facts, but these facts are far too outlandish for us to wrap our minds around. Some stars are so enormous that our sun could fit into them seven billion times. …Now can you really picture that? I know I can’t. So why do we bother learning the facts?

We bother with the facts and statistics for the very same reason I am writing this story: hope. As humans, most of us hope to comprehend why the things around us are the way they are. But do we? Just today, I said “I hope you enjoy your year.” to a new student at my school. He pondered for a while, and then replied “I hope… you go #@!% yourself.” Now, I can make an educated guess as to why he said that. Perhaps he was having a bad day, or perhaps he had experienced a tragedy in his past. There are many reasons why he could have been a jerk, but will I ever know for certain? Science is the same way. We can say that hydrogen is essential for life, but how do we know that holds true six trillion light-years away in another galaxy? We don’t; we simply assume it’s true. We continue to attempt to unravel new mysteries that have no guarantee of actually being true and that we could not fully comprehend even if they are.

This story is desperate to tell itself, yet if I am to continue writing it (and you continue reading it) we need to establish right here and now that humankind will never comprehend everything about how things work. We will never come close, because the universe is so immensely huge (and we are such a small part of it), we could never account for all of it. The events that occur in life are so complex and unordered: we will never be able to truly predict anything. Heavenly bodies are so diverse in their nature: we will never be able to explain why they all act certain ways, or why they all orbit here instead of there. We will never be able to calculate how many bodies we can’t see are being affected or are affecting the bodies we can see. And we will never be able to compare the two and arrive at a nice, reasonable conclusion. The reason we try is because it is human nature to hope to understand what we don’t. At least that is my guess. My guess is as good as yours.

Pulsars are tiny stars made entirely of neutrons. Their name comes from the fact that some of them send radio waves out into space, like a lone lighthouse to the sea. The pulsar in our story, like all pulsars, was born when gas from a supernova came together and started to shift, combine, and condense to create a new form. We don’t really comprehend why or even how it happened, so for now we content ourselves in knowing that it did happen. Pulsars have as much (if not more) mass than our sun, and yet are limited to around ten kilometers across. Our particular pulsar weighed as much as the sun and was about nine and a half kilometers wide. Now, something that’s as heavy as the sun but only ten kilometers wide contains a whole lot of matter in a very short space. In fact, I believe pulsars might be the densest heavenly bodies in the universe (but that is just my personal opinion).

Again, we don’t know why pulsars are so small and yet so heavy. All we know is that they are. Now, something as heavy as a pulsar attracts other bodies. Our scientists attribute this to gravity, which is one of their few laws that actually seems to have no exceptions and is universal. The laws of gravity propose that the more mass a body has, the more other bodies are drawn towards it. And so pulsars, being heavy beyond our comprehension, naturally attract other heavenly bodies that end up orbiting around them: and here is where the scientist encounters his problem. All pulsars are incredibly heavy, and so all pulsars should have other bodies floating around them. And yet, for some reason we cannot comprehend, many pulsars do not. Many pulsars are completely alone in the universe. Why they remain solitary with so many bodies floating around in the sky remains a mystery to us. But just because we don’t know why it happens doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Our particular pulsar was one of these mysterious pulsars that had no companions. It lived completely alone in its own little “corner” of the universe. And yet even this pulsar, who lived billions of light-years away from earth, was able to have been reached by our ever-probing curiosity. Our pulsar was discovered in 1982 by a man named Shrinivas Kulkarni. Shrinivas was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to astronomy. He studied pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, and dwarf stars especially. He had already discovered the “Brown Dwarfs” by the time he picked out our little pulsar from the rest of the sky. He dubbed the pulsar a “millisecond pulsar” because of the frantic pace at which it sent out its radio signals. And so, our pulsar became the very first of the millisecond pulsars, and was given the name PSR B1937+21. Shrinivas moved on and continued his successful work as an astronomer. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, being one of only ten living Indians to receive this honor. He has now retired, and is living out the rest of his years as a proud, successful, and well-liked man.

Shrinivas brought the millisecond pulsars to the world’s scrutiny, and even after his retirement progress is being continually made in this field. Scientists make new observations on these abnormally fast pulsars every day. In fact, in 2005 our scientists unveiled PSR J1748-2446ad, a pulsar with the fastest spinning time yet recorded: 716 times per second. One Mississippi. That was one second. The pulsar just did 716 spins. Just why this pulsar goes so fast (and how long it can keep it up) is beyond our comprehension. But we do not mind: it feels good to have discovered such an abnormal heavenly body, and to announce its existence to the world so that all may scrutinize it in the night sky.

But that pulsar is not the focus of our story. Our pulsar, now known as PSR B1937+21, currently spins 614 times per second. Compared to the incomprehensible pace of PSR J1748-2446ad, this isn’t that fast. But concerning pulsars as a whole, ours is fairly quicker than most. Now I have said before that some pulsars send out radio signals into the vastness of the cosmos. Not all pulsars do this: our scientists have found many pulsars that do not send out signals as they spin. They are content to simply be; they don’t need to use radio waves. But many pulsars scientists have discovered do send out these signals. The first pulsar was located because of the signals it sent out (thus the name “pulsar”), and likewise our own pulsar is far too distant and small to be seen by us here on earth. Only through all the signals it emitted were we able to locate it. Though all the signals are typically radio waves, pulsars each produce their own signals a bit differently. We do not fully comprehend the nature of our pulsar’s waves, or how they’re produced. But we have been able to lump pulsars into a few broad categories depending on some of the basic features their waves have. Our pulsar’s waves (we suspect) are basically fueled by the continual decaying of its magnetic field. Scientists have dubbed these types of pulsars Magnetars.

We do not comprehend how long it takes PSR B1937+21’s waves to reach us, but we assume that by the time we can hear them they’re long in the past. As far as we know, PSR B1937+21 is still out there in its little “corner” of the universe, sending out its signals all around itself 614 times per second into the emptiness of space.


Don Backer was thirty-nine and had no wife or children. He lived alone in his Californian house, although he was seldom there. Don spent most of his hours (and all of his days) in the observatories at which he worked. If you saw Don on the street, you would see a small, rat-like man with disheveled brown hair, crooked and yellow teeth, and unkempt fingernails. Perhaps most noticeable would be his terrible posture: he might be twice as tall if he could have managed to stand up straight.

However, the chances of anyone seeing Don out and about slid downwards with each sunset. Don was by nature a shy man, and did not cope well with the stares he received. And so, every time Don went out during the day, he was less inclined to ever go out again by the time he made it back to his shelter. And so as the years passed, so did Don gradually pass out of society and peoples’ minds. And Don stayed only in his two observatories and his house.

Yet in 1982 even his house (along with one of the observatories) would fade away during the climax of Don’s work. Don had been putting all his time into his most recent discovery: signals from space that resemble a pulsar’s but were far too rapid to be from one. By now Don constantly dwelt within the observatory. Long after the other astronomers had thrown off their coats and binoculars and had gone out to meet the evening, you could still find Don working away at his project in some dark laboratory. He would scuttle around from his machines to his desk to his instruments; back and forth, back and forth, with only the meager light from his lamp to guide him.

Tonight, Don Backer would finally be able to prove that the rapid signals came from an undiscovered type of pulsar. And yet, for some reason he could not summon the excitement that was supposed to come naturally with new discoveries. Don sat down at his desk, but instead of writing he paused, and started thinking. Stopping to think was a bad habit Don had been trying to overcome, but many times his thoughts would simply overwhelm him. Why did he not feel any excitement? Where was his sense of accomplishment? Don felt empty, and that frightened him, because if he was empty then that meant he had no purpose. He quickly snapped out of it, however, and started to write down the reasons why he might feel the way he did. After a few minutes, he came to the reasonable conclusion that it was lack of sleep.

“Well, I suppose the best option for me now is to journey home and rest myself.”

Don sat in the dark room, with only the hum of his machines acknowledging his decision. Maybe he put up his papers, turned off the light, and had his hand on the doorknob. Or maybe he didn’t leave his desk, and never even came close to opening the door. Either way, Don did not journey out into the brisk air of that night. Instead, he continued working. After all, he was almost done with his project, and he wanted his notes to be so detailed that even Shrinivas couldn’t revise them.