BALTIMORE — After the image flashes up on the projector, a few quiet beats tick by, punctuated only by a soft “wow.” Everyone is processing. Then more “wows” bubble out, and people are talking over one another, laughing. Suddenly two astronomers, Amaya Moro-Martin and Karl Gordon, are out of their chairs, sticking their noses closer to the space fantasia onscreen, agog — “It’s a jet! This is full of jets!” — at the crisp, hallucinatory grandeur of new stars sprouting from a nebula like seeds from a flower bed.
The screen zooms in, in, in toward a jutting promontory many light-years long that stands out in sharp relief.
“Oh my God,” someone says — only that someone was me, accidentally.
“Welcome to the team,” someone else responds.
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