SUNAYANA BHARGAVA

THE NIGHT SHIFT

Six-hundred kilometres from Santiago, a polished lens pierces a sweeping blur of the night sky. This kind of surveillance is harmless. It is the birthright of the astronomer to undertake a pilgrimage to understand their origin, collecting the steady distillation of photons. The condensed light that follows is almost a complete fingerprint of every single atom that has ever existed.

It is difficult to imagine that galactic stamp collectors could bring harm into the world when they appear to be driven, ultimately, by yearning. The Chilean director Patricio Guzmán mused, ‘What are the telescopes looking for, the space probes? It seems all this progress is the product of a deep nostalgia.’

Behind the veil of solitary pilgrims stationed on mountaintops searching the abyss, the machinery grows. The dizzying calibration of mirrors. We know the shudder of a black hole from a beam of light underground that moves a distance as small as a hydrogen atom. Now transit vans are required to move petabytes of data after one single night of observations. A surplus of information is considered a boon of the modern era. Our models complexify, are threaded onto multiple computers at once, as if one could reveal the answers of the cosmos by brute force alone. Old light becomes new data.

The impartial pursuit of our cosmological lineage is disrupted by the knowledge that scientists have shared routes to observatories with drug cartels. The cameras built for the surveillance of skies run in parallel with that of states. If one knows how to separate the foam of stars in a crowded photograph, they can partition families across borders. There is nothing abstract about the astronomer’s solitude if it is fought on contested land, or demanded close to those who grieve losses more recent than gigayears. Nostalgia is brutalising – how does one search for their place in the distant past while others remain lost in the immediate one? Invasive satellite trails will wash over these remote vistas soon, as we struggle to cling to what remains of our analogue memory. Each faint source of light has already taken centuries to reach us. By the end of the night shift, we widen the horizon beyond which we will eventually see nothing.

BIOGRAPHY

Sunayana Bhargava is a British-born Indian astrophysicist and poet. She is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets programme. Her work has been featured in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Hallelujah for 50ft Women, BBC Radio 3’s The Verb and Arts and Ideas series, and by the Dead Women Poets Society. In 2020, her poetry was displayed at the Haida Gwaii Museum in Vancouver, Canada, as part of a series titled Dark Skies: Cosmic Matter, Art, Stories, Sounds. When she's not writing or researching, she can usually be found searching for the sunniest park bench to sit on.

CREATIVE STATEMENT

The Night Shift is a short meditation on digital and analogue memory in the context of astronomy. Astronomy sits simultaneously at the periphery of abstract and the concrete, the old and the modern. This piece aims to coalesce the various interpretations of our work as astronomers - the innate and intuitive feeling of finding one's origin through history, combined with the modernisation of the tools used to do it. While the nostalgia and poignance of astronomy is well-documented, its use for surveillance, automation, military tactics are less known. It is not possible to divorce astronomy from its political circumstances, e.g. in the cases of telescopes built in Hawaii and Chile. It is perhaps the most complicated time in history (modern and cosmological) to be an astronomer, peering cautiously over the edge of modern precision, with an eye focused on everything which came before us. Ultimately it is the lives and livelihoods of others that take precedence over our pursuit of the past.