Music and the stars: A Grand Canyon astronomer's guide to awe

As the sun dipped low to the southwest of the Grand Canyon, tourists flocked to the rim.

They lined up to catch the shuttle to Hopi Point, and gathered in the hundreds by the visitor center, clutching backpacks and sweaters and cameras. Languages from around the globe mingled in hushed tones. The show was about to begin.

The crowds watched the canyon keenly, peering through zoom lenses and binoculars and eyeglasses. The ancient layers had started to change color with the sun's slow descent. The vibrant hues of golden hour gave way to the muted, earthy tones of not-quite-dusk. The jagged shadows of buttes and spires disappeared and reappeared, a merry-go-round of angles cast on to the cascading rocks cradling the Colorado River.

They were looking at deep time. The rocks in the Grand Canyon span from 270 million to 1.8 billion years old, a stunning backdrop against which human existence is but a mere blip.

Just before the sun disappeared, it cast a searing spotlight onto the very top layers, lighting them up in a final display of brilliant sandstone and vermillion. And then it was gone.

The crowd trickled back to their cars, deep time obscured by darkness. But above their heads, it was just starting to come into view.

A CGI universe, for most

More than 99% of Americans live under skies polluted by light.

This pervasive artificial glow obscures stars and the constellations they form. It hides our galaxy, the Milky Way, from four in every five people living in the U.S. It disrupts our circadian rhythms, which dictate our sleep and wake cycles, and has a deleterious effect on plant and animal life.

The astronomer David Koerner thinks it also affects our sense of place — in the universe.

“Seeing the galaxy in which you live, and understanding that it’s there, and understanding that your place in the world is not just your place among your work associates, or whatever,” he said. “It’s in this huge cosmos at large.”

Koerner, a retired Northern Arizona University professor, recently lived at the Grand Canyon for six weeks as the park’s astronomer-in-residence, a position created to promote dark sky education and awareness.

Grand Canyon National Park was named an International Dark Sky Park in 2019. To earn and keep the certification, it retrofitted thousands of lights to reduce glare and shine downward, and maintains a certain level of sky quality. It is among 148 dark sky places in the U.S., many of them concentrated in the southwest.

Some call these places home, or live under uncertified expanses of dark sky. But most only experience the full grandeur of an unpolluted night sky through a screen: a photo on social media, an episode of "Star Trek," the special effects of a science fiction film.

“I think that gives people the idea that the universe is CGI,” Koerner said.

But then they visit someplace where the sky is actually visible.

During Koerner’s stint at the North Rim, he was out stargazing with tourists. One woman, visiting from the East Coast, was visibly astonished as she stared up at the sky.

“We can’t see any of this,” she said in wonder, “but it’s all there.”

And to Koerner, it offers a view of deep time that is just as profound and moving as that found in the Grand Canyon.

“Deep time is three times longer in space than on Earth,” he said, “because the universe is three times as old.”

Hollywood tales: Arizona author fell in love with the films of Monument Valley. Now he's telling their stories

'A hell of a story'

Deep time was first conceptualized in the 18th century by the geologist James Hutton.

After observing rock formations along the Scottish coast, Hutton came to believe the Earth was much, much older than the 6,000 years that society imagined. He was particularly interested in unconformities: the meeting of rocks from different geological periods, indicating a break in time.

In 1788, the scientist John Playfair accompanied Hutton to one such unconformity, at Siccar Point, on the east coast of Scotland. “The mind seemed to grow giddy,” Playfair wrote afterward, “by looking so far into the abyss of time.”

It was deep time that drew Koerner to the Colorado Plateau.

Growing up in Long Beach, California, his parents adhered to a creationist view of the universe. But young Koerner caught glimpses of a different story. In particular, he was taken by a scene in the Disney film "Fantasia," set to Stravinsky’s "Rite of Spring," a sequence that portrayed the scientific origins of the Earth and evolution.

These conflicting versions created a puzzling cognitive dissonance. “I think I just wanted to know, which is it?” Koerner said.

He decided science offered the more alluring version of events. The Colorado Plateau, with its ancient rock formations and dinosaur fossils, offered a tangible link to the past he was so fascinated with.

“It was just a place where you could touch very deep parts of time,” he said. “And sometimes people find that daunting and they would shy away from it. But for some reason it just grounded me.”

His parents were both music educators, and Koerner followed a similar path, working as a freelance pianist in his 20s. At around 30, feeling “philosophically unsatisfied,” he went back to school and made his way through the sciences, starting out in geology, completing his undergraduate in physics, and then earning a Ph.D. in astronomy.

He had always imagined living somewhere on the Colorado Plateau. But academic positions in the area, loosely centered on the sparsely populated Four Corners region, are hard to come by.

He ended up on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. It was a prestigious position, but didn’t quite suit Koerner, who found himself the lone astronomer in a department full of cosmologists. So when a position opened up at NAU, he applied, and moved to Flagstaff in 2002.

Now retired, his zeal for the area is as strong as ever — and for the story that captured his imagination all those years ago.

He still marvels at the Big Bang, the fact the universe began from an expanding, hot, dense state of matter that turned into galaxies and stars and planets and life.

“I just think it's a hell of a story,” Koerner said. “I think it's better story than any of the ones that cultures have made. It still blows me away.”

Astronomy and a canyon quartet

For those who don’t share Koerner’s passion, science talks can be a hard sell.

This is perhaps best encapsulated in a Walt Whitman poem titled “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The narrator describes listening to an astronomy talk, full of figures and charts and diagrams, and starting to feel sick and tired. They end up wandering off, to look up in “perfect silence” at the stars.

“Most astronomers I know hate this poem,” Koerner said.

It does, however, correctly identify a conflict: the information overload of science contrasted with the overwhelming beauty of the night sky. It’s a dilemma that Koerner, tasked with public outreach as the Grand Canyon astronomer-in-residence, has had to grapple with.

In a bid to resolve it, he reached for another of his passions: music.

The unlikely pairing started 15 years back, when Koerner got a call from a childhood friend. They had studied with the same violin teacher, but hadn’t spoken in years.

The friend was calling to tell Koerner about a special type of rafting trip he had been leading down the Colorado River. It had tour guides and guests, but also musicians: a string quartet who played concerts along the way. Was Koerner interested in being part of it?

“I hadn’t played violin for a long time,” Koerner said. “But it just sounded like the most amazing thing ever.”

He started playing violin again, and took up viola, too. A couple of years later, he joined the quartet for a 15-day rafting trip. They played eight concerts in slot canyons, the steep, narrow rocks offering exceptional acoustics.

His return to music in retirement got him thinking about composition. Then the Grand Canyon astronomer-in-residence program started up, calling for astronomers and scientists but also those with creative pursuits, such as art, writing or music, to complement their stint at the rim.

I’m going to have to compose or something, Koerner thought. He made a few tentative efforts. Then came a message from the universe.

He was on a string quartet rafting trip when, as they passed through Fishtail Rapids, a rogue wave hit the boat. Koerner tried to hang on, but was thrown hard against the boat, ripping his rotator cuff in several places.

He had to have surgery, and couldn’t play violin or viola for a long time. “It’s still kind of hard,” he said.

Recovery felt like a reckoning. “I had it out with the Grand Canyon,” Koerner said. “I’m like, ‘Why did you smack me?’”

He emerged with this: He had to take composition more seriously. So he signed up for lessons at NAU, and started trying to write musical pieces that embodied the physical properties of stars.

Wait — what?

Music and astrophysics and how they go together

Astrophysics and music both involve math, Koerner said. Think about a nuclear fusion reaction in the core of a star, where two hydrogen atoms, each with a single proton, combine to become a helium atom, with two.

“When you’re adding a proton, I just let that be a half-step interval, right?” he said, referring to the distance between two adjacent keys on a piano. “So I would build a little motif out of the nuclear reaction.”

It is abstract, he concedes unprompted.

“Now, that’s not something where if I just played that for somebody, they’d go ‘That’s a nuclear reaction to the star,’” Koerner said. “They’d have no idea, unless I told them, and that’s OK.”

Other examples are more evocative. A supernova for instance: a strong steady rhythm for the star blazing away. A fist pounding on the keys to indicate the collapse of the core. Cascading arpeggios for the aftermath. A fast, repeating note for the pulsar left behind, a fast rotating neutron star that casts a recurring signal out into the universe.

“Modern composers are a little bit esoteric, you know, avant garde music,” Koerner said.

In other words: it’s not for everyone. One time, he was practicing at the university when a harried man emerged from a nearby room and issued a blunt plea for Koerner to stop: “Dude, your music is really painful.”

(“It wasn’t one of the pieces that was meant to soothe,” Koerner said, in his defense.)

The pieces work best if he explains them, and then plays them. So that’s what he did, for audiences at the Grand Canyon.

He has a composition about the Summer Triangle, an asterism comprised of the stars Vega, Altair and Deneb. He chose it because it’s easy to see: “If you know what it is, you can’t miss it.”

Each star has its own story. Vega has a disk of dust around it, emblemized by a collision in the music. Altair rotates at a blistering pace of once every seven hours, represented by a spinning motif. Deneb, deceivingly fainter in comparison, is much larger than the other two, and much farther away. One day, it will go supernova.

Another way Koerner tries to create tangible connections to the universe above is by pointing out the similar ages of certain visible stars and the rock layers in the canyon.

“You can look up at a star and say, that was formed in the Proterozoic,” he said.

Vega, for instance, is about 455 million years old, placing it, age-wise, between two layers of Paleozoic rock seen in the canyon: the 500 million-year-old deposits of Frenchman Mountain Dolostone and the 385 million-year-old Temple Butte Formation.

It might seem surprising that the ages align so well, given how much older the universe is than the rocks of the Grand Canyon. But there’s a simple explanation: the stars we see easily are not the closest stars, but tend to be very big and very bright, with a much shorter lifespan than those of smaller stars.

So the stars we can see without a telescope, like Vega, tend to be younger — just like the rocks in the Grand Canyon.

Finding awe in the Canyon's deep time

There’s a word for what people feel when they witness the deep time of the Grand Canyon: awe.

This emotion is of increasing interest to psychologists. Some research suggests awe-inducing experiences can have positive effects, such as a diminished sense of self, increased humility, and a greater feeling of connectedness.

The concept of awe can be slippery to grasp, and as such, papers tend to offer examples. Some come up more than others: One, standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Two, gazing up at the stars. Three, listening to a beautiful piece of music.

“The regularity with which these three examples occur was almost amusing to me,” Koerner said. It also made him wonder: could he offer all three… at once?

During Koerner's stint at the North Rim, a ranger persuaded him to lug his 250-pound digital acoustic hybrid piano to Cape Royal, a promontory overlooking the canyon.

The North Rim is significantly less trafficked than the South Rim, and Cape Royal was an additional drive from the village. Still, an audience of about 30 gathered to sit and look out over the canyon. As the crescent moon and Venus set in the sky, Koerner played a set of moon-related pieces. (“This was not the painful music,” he said.)

During the performance, Koerner said, “I could tell people were feeling awe.”

It was in the way they described the scene: the beauty of the sky, the magnitude of the canyon, the meditative quality of the music. It was also in their focused attention, a rarity in a world where we are increasingly tethered to our phones.

Koerner had been hoping to create a sense of magic, to sweep people up in the kind of consuming thrill they might find at a concert, or religious service. It was easier, he said, with the moon and Venus on his side.

“I think the music helps people get the skyscape and I think the skyscape helps people get the music,” he said.

There’s an old statistic that suggests people look at the Grand Canyon for an average of 15 minutes.

“There's a lot of people who want it on their bucket list and they stop by, look and go, ‘Okay, what's for lunch?” Koerner said. “I think looking at stars can be the same for people. They'll go, ‘Oh, I know that constellation, that's kind of cool. Oh look, the Milky Way. Okay. You know, I'm tired now, let's go to bed.’”

He wants people to get more from these experiences. And he thinks music can help hold their attention.

“These people were there for an hour while I played, and they did not look like they were antsy, dying to be done,” he said. “I think that’s remarkable.”

He did it again the next night, to a larger audience closer to the lodge. It wasn’t as extravagant a scene as out on Cape Royal, Koerner said, but still — they forced an encore.

In the dark, questions of life in the universe

Two hours after sunset, the rim was deserted. The crowds had retreated to their cabins and RVs, the click of cameras replaced by the trill of crickets.

The crescent moon faintly illuminated the canyon’s highest peaks and spires, but most of the chasm was an inky black. All you could see were the tiny bobbing headlamps of hikers, journeying from rim to rim.

Above, deep time awaited.

Stars twinkled amid scattered clouds, the Milky Way visible through the gaps. Koerner beamed a laser pointer into the sky. There was the Summer Triangle: Vega, with its disk of dust; the fast-rotating Altair; and Deneb, believed to be more than 2000 light years away.

Deneb is huge, Koerner said. As in, its radius is roughly similar to the radius of the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

“If you put it where the sun is,” he added, “it would fill the entire sky.”

It was hard not to think about what else might be out there.

This train of thought is not reserved for fans of science fiction. The possibility of extraterrestrial life is something astronomers think about. Koerner even co-wrote a book about it in the late 1990s.

It’s certainly possible there are other civilizations out there, he said. Just think about how many planets there are.

“There are at least 400 billion stars in our galaxy. They all have planets. And there are trillions of galaxies like our galaxy,” he said. “Just the number of planets is a one with 20 to 30 zeroes after it.”

Not all of them are Earth-like — but with a number that gargantuan, some will be.

Finding extraterrestrial life is more complicated. Thus far, expeditions have lacked the required sensitivity, Koerner said, though new instruments may soon change that.

“What will we see?” Koerner said. “I don't know.”

If extraterrestrial civilizations exist, he added, they are likely advanced far beyond humanity. “Do we think we're one of the first civilizations, if there are a lot of them?” he said. “Highly unlikely. I mean, the Earth didn't even get made until the universe was 9 billion years old.”

Consider the timescales: the relative youth of our planet against the 13.7 billion year old universe. Even the oldest rocks in the Grand Canyon are only 1.7 billion years old.

“How many generations of stars and planetary systems came and went?” Koerner said. “If life happens, and evolves to intelligence, then it's already gone somewhere we can't even imagine.”

Can our technology find them? Would we even be interesting to them? It’s hard to say.

But it would be odd, Koerner said, given the vastness of the universe, if humans were the only life form to develop technology or intelligence.

“You can also already see other lifeforms on our own planet that are starting to develop technologies,” he said. “I mean, it was only a couple of million years ago that our technology was a rock.”

Is there a future for dark skies?

To the north, a bright streak flashed against the sky.

“Whoa,” Koerner said. “Did you see that?”

The blaze was brief, but so intense it was hard to miss. A shooting star?

“Yeah,” Koerner said. “Yeah.”

He paused.

“Well, it might have been a piece of space junk, for that matter.”

Humanity's steady march into space is having an effect on astronomy. Space junk, Koerner said, is “an annoyance, and it’s getting worse.” Radio pollution is also an issue, produced in particular by Space X satellites.

People increasingly talk about the democratization of space, the broad notion of opening up space travel beyond the likes of NASA astronauts.

“My thoughts are it's a big mess,” Koerner said. Then he laughed. “It’s so chaotic, and such a mess that I don’t have pronounced principles to stand by, because I feel like it’s all hopeless.”

It will be driven by special interests, he predicted, and hallmarked by an inability to cooperate. And while space tourism is one thing, mining and colonization of the moon and asteroids is another.

“It’s going to be extractive capitalism all over again,” he said. “And how will global governments deal with it?”

Back on Earth, most people can’t even see the night sky.

There is hope, even for heavily light-polluted areas. National parks and preserves are natural dark sky candidates, but that doesn't mean it's impossible elsewhere. The Fountain Hills neighborhood in sprawling metropolitan Phoenix, for instance, is a certified dark sky place. The rise of astrotourism — people traveling to places specifically for their dark skies — indicates a growing awareness of what we cannot see.

“What we all hope is that it will spill over into urban and suburban areas,” Koerner said. “Even though they're developed and populated, they don't need to be as light polluted as they are.”

In the end, we're left with the draw of artificial light: It can illuminate — and darken — at will.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Grand Canyon astronomer explores space, time and music