Today's Wisdom - Helium, the Brontes and the Great Attractor

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Today's wisdom explores:

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Helium is the only element on the periodic table discovered in the sky before it was found on Earth. During a total solar eclipse on 18 August 1868, astronomers pointed their instruments at the Sun and split its light into a spectrum, where they noticed a bright yellow line that matched no known substance. The English scientist Norman Lockyer concluded it must be an entirely new element, and named it after the Greek god of the Sun, Helios. For twenty-seven years helium existed only as a mysterious line in sunlight, until the Scottish chemist William Ramsay finally isolated it from a uranium mineral on Earth in 1895. The name is fitting, as helium is the fundamental fuel of stars. In their cores, immense pressure fuses hydrogen into helium at a rate of roughly 600 million tonnes per second, driving the very reaction that makes our Sun shine.

Beyond party balloons and high-pitched voices, helium is indispensable to modern technology and medicine. Helium has the lowest boiling point of any element, turning liquid at around minus 269°C, which makes it an unmatched coolant for anything that must be kept ferociously cold. Its single most important job is inside the MRI scanner, where each machine relies on roughly 2,000 liters of ultra-cold liquid helium to keep its superconducting magnets working, and without it those magnets, and the scans they produce, would fail. The same gas cools the magnets of particle accelerators, shields the delicate manufacture of semiconductor chips and fiber optics, and inflates car airbags in an instant. In its strangest form of all, when chilled to extremes, helium becomes a superfluid with zero friction. It is able to flow uphill and creep up and over the walls of its own container, defying everything intuition expects of a liquid.

Despite being the second most abundant element in the universe, helium is genuinely scarce on Earth. Helium is so extraordinarily light that once it escapes into the atmosphere it drifts up and off into space, lost forever, unlike almost every other resource we can recycle or recover. Nearly all the helium we use is a finite inheritance, formed over billions of years by the slow radioactive decay of elements like uranium deep underground, and trapped by chance alongside pockets of natural gas from which it is extracted. When a child's balloon deflates, that helium is gone from the planet for good. Recurring global shortages have already forced scientists to halt experiments and hospitals to worry over their scanners, made worse by the fact that so much of the supply depends on a handful of facilities and an unstable market. There is a real absurdity in using one of the rarest substances we can extract to make party balloons float for an afternoon, and unfortunately once it is gone, it is not coming back.

It remains one of the strangest facts in all of literature that in a single year, three sisters working at the same dining table in an isolated parsonage wrote three of the finest novels in the English language. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë grew up in the parsonage at Haworth, a village perched on the bleak Yorkshire moors, where their father Patrick served as the local clergyman. Their childhood was steeped in loss. Their mother died when they were very young, and their two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died aged just eleven and ten after falling ill at a harsh boarding school, a place Charlotte would later immortalize as the cruel Lowood in Jane Eyre. Left largely to themselves, the four surviving children, the three sisters and their brother Branwell, retreated into vivid imaginary kingdoms named Angria and Gondal, filling tiny handmade books with stories in minuscule handwriting. The barren moors that surrounded them, wild and windswept, seeped into their imaginations and would one day give the world some of its most haunting fiction.

Their path to publication was paved with a necessary deception. In an age when female writers were dismissed or patronized, and when England's own poet laureate had bluntly told Charlotte that literature could not be the business of a woman's life, the sisters chose to hide their sex. They published under masculine-sounding pen names that preserved their real initials, becoming Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Their first joint venture, a book of poetry released in 1846, sold a grand total of two copies, however this didn’t dishearten them. The year 1847 changed everything. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, the fierce and passionate story of a plain governess who refuses to be anyone's inferior, became an immediate sensation. Emily's Wuthering Heights followed, a dark and violent tale of obsessive love on the moors that scandalized many readers, who found it too savage and strange, only for later generations to hail it as a work of towering genius. Anne's Agnes Grey appeared alongside them, and her later novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall proved remarkably bold in its unflinching portrait of a woman fleeing a drunken, abusive husband.

The triumph was shadowed by almost unbearable tragedy, for the same year the world discovered the Brontës, the family began to vanish. In the space of just nine months, Branwell died first, worn down by drink and illness, followed by Emily, who caught a fatal chill at his funeral and refused all medical help, dying at thirty with her singular masterpiece barely understood. Anne died the very next year of tuberculosis, aged just twenty-nine. Charlotte was left utterly alone in the silent parsonage with her aging father, having watched all five of her siblings die before her. She continued to write, publishing further novels and finally revealing the true identity of the Bell brothers to a stunned literary world, before she too died in 1855, not yet thirty-nine and newly pregnant. None of the sisters lived to see forty. That so much genius could bloom and be extinguished so quickly, in one family in one remote house on the edge of the moors, still draws readers to Haworth today, where they walk the same rooms in which three young women reshaped English literature forever.

Right now, without you feeling a thing, you are being flung through space at a staggering speed toward something no one has ever clearly seen. The Milky Way, along with more than 100,000 neighboring galaxies, is streaming across the universe at hundreds of kilometers a second, drawn toward a mysterious region of space astronomers call the Great Attractor. The story began in the 1970s, when scientists mapping the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, noticed something strange. One side of the sky appeared slightly warmer than the other, a lopsidedness that only made sense if our entire galaxy was hurtling in a particular direction. When they worked out the speed, it was astonishing, roughly 600 kilometers per second, or over two million kilometers per hour, far faster than the general expansion of the universe could explain. Something humongous was pulling us in out there.

The maddening problem is that we cannot see it. The Great Attractor lies in a direction of the sky blocked by the Milky Way itself, hidden behind the dense clouds of gas, dust, and stars that make up our own galaxy's disc. Astronomers call this obscured strip the Zone of Avoidance, because the glare and dust of our galaxy blot out roughly a fifth of the sky, drawing a curtain across precisely the spot we most want to examine. For decades this left scientists able to feel the pull with great precision while being unable to identify what was behind it. Only by turning to X-ray, infrared, and radio telescopes, which can pierce the cosmic fog better than visible light, did the picture slowly sharpen. Behind the curtain they found a genuine concentration of mass, anchored by a huge collection of galaxies called the Norma Cluster, sitting around 150 to 250 million light-years away and holding the mass of tens of thousands of Milky Ways.

The final twist is that the Great Attractor turned out not to be the true master of our motion at all, but a way station on a much grander journey. Beyond it, some 650 million light-years distant, lies an even more colossal structure called the Shapley Supercluster, the largest concentration of galaxies in the local universe, and it appears the Great Attractor is itself being dragged toward Shapley, taking us along for the ride. All of this is now understood as part of our home supercluster, named Laniakea, a Hawaiian word meaning "immense heaven,. It is a vast basin of 100,000 galaxies all flowing toward a common center like water spiraling toward a drain. Yet we will almost certainly never arrive. Laniakea is not gravitationally bound, and the relentless expansion of the universe, driven by dark energy, is stretching the space between these structures faster than gravity can reel them in. We are caught in a cosmic tug of war, falling toward a destination we will never reach, pulled by a giant we still cannot fully see.

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The A Little Wiser Team