ALAN DRESSLER, 42. ON THE TRAIL OF THE GREAT ATTRACTOR
He became hooked on astronomy as a 5-year-old boy, the moment he saw the majestic rings of Saturn through a telescope in Cincinnati's Hyde Park. Now a staff astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, Dressler is shaking up conventional astronomical wisdom. In the nearby Andromeda galaxy, he helped locate a black hole, a celestial abyss that sucks in light and matter like a cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Then, in 1986, he and his team discovered an object that is like something straight out of science fiction. The Great Attractor is a mass of dark matter, unimaginably large, 200 million light-years from Earth. The Attractor is invisible -- it makes its presence known only through its immense gravitational tug on galaxies. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of thousands in its grip. This finding raises important questions about the Big Bang, the huge explosion believed to have started the universe. Cosmologists, who study its origin, have long assumed that the Big Bang spread matter smoothly across the heavens. Now Dressler has demonstrated the universe to be lumpy, like oatmeal.
''There must be an element of the Big Bang we don't understand,'' he says. ''It seems unlikely that the universe could have gone from smooth to its current state. For something as vast as the Great Attractor to have formed, either the primordial cosmos had larger structures than we previously thought, or the universe has taken longer to evolve.'' Dressler's discovery was based on years of work, with colleague Sandra Faber, at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory high in the Andes Mountains of Chile. The air at that remote site is so clear, says Dressler, that one can read a newspaper by the light of the Milky Way.
He became hooked on astronomy as a 5-year-old boy, the moment he saw the majestic rings of Saturn through a telescope in Cincinnati's Hyde Park. Now a staff astronomer at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, Dressler is shaking up conventional astronomical wisdom. In the nearby Andromeda galaxy, he helped locate a black hole, a celestial abyss that sucks in light and matter like a cosmic vacuum cleaner.
Then, in 1986, he and his team discovered an object that is like something straight out of science fiction. The Great Attractor is a mass of dark matter, unimaginably large, 200 million light-years from Earth. The Attractor is invisible -- it makes its presence known only through its immense gravitational tug on galaxies. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of thousands in its grip. This finding raises important questions about the Big Bang, the huge explosion believed to have started the universe. Cosmologists, who study its origin, have long assumed that the Big Bang spread matter smoothly across the heavens. Now Dressler has demonstrated the universe to be lumpy, like oatmeal.
''There must be an element of the Big Bang we don't understand,'' he says. ''It seems unlikely that the universe could have gone from smooth to its current state. For something as vast as the Great Attractor to have formed, either the primordial cosmos had larger structures than we previously thought, or the universe has taken longer to evolve.'' Dressler's discovery was based on years of work, with colleague Sandra Faber, at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory high in the Andes Mountains of Chile. The air at that remote site is so clear, says Dressler, that one can read a newspaper by the light of the Milky Way.
Clearly visible overhead are the galaxy's millions of stars, deep dark rifts, and objects such as the Eta Carina nebula (see photo). Dressler says the sight can transfix an observer: ''It becomes an emotional experience.'' What moves him most profoundly, however, is not the spectacle of the heavens but the human mind: ''Most people are awed by the size of the universe and our being so small. My view is completely opposite. The mind is the most complex thing we know of -- complexity resides not out there but here, in our biology and our minds. The marvelous thing is that we can discover, understand, and contemplate the universe
