Not the usual star

Somewhere out there is an unusual star, covered over by the gloss of a forgotten galaxy.

It may seem dim, and less than ordinary, but in the homeless community of Sacramento there are more than a few candidates for a kind of stardom.

They go unnoticed. They have been fully overlooked. You have to pay keen attention. They have been lost — you could say. Like a gem covered in the sand. But they are not just unusual, but the best of their sort.

Comments

Steve said…

The "star" to which you refer is actually a galaxy. It's apparently the oldest galaxy scientists have yet been able to see with telescopes. It's estimated to be some 13 billion light years away, and scientists are seeing it now as it was only about 600 million years after the presumed creation of the universe.

I guess you could say that such astronomical observation of very distant celestial objects is the closest thing we have to a time machine in that it allows us to peer back into the very distant past.

As for the "unnoticed" or unheralded "stars" of Sacramento's homeless community, perhaps you could focus your journalistic "telescope" on some of them from time to time and bring them to our attention by profiling them for us. I think that many of us would find this very interesting, informative, and even inspiring.

October 22, 2010 at 12:19 AM

Unknown said…

To the first sentence I added "covered over by the gloss of a forgotten galaxy" since you first read the post.

What is curious to me is that the age of the universe is supposed to be just under 14 billion years. If that is so, it would seem to me, that both the old galaxy that was "found" and us, in the Milky Way, nearly the age of the universe apart. Does that put us both on the balloon rubber of the expanding cosmos?

Yep. That would be a good project: focusing on what talent there is in Homeless World Sacramento.

October 22, 2010 at 12:02 PM

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