A few years ago, Avi Loeb spent some time with his family near Cradle Mountain in the highlands of central Tasmania, a rugged island 150 miles south of Australia. Their cabin had no Internet connection, affording Loeb some free time after dinner to step outside and look up at the clear night sky, untainted by any trace of urban glow. He was bowled over by a dazzling spectacle: the countless stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way, airily stretched across the heavens. Off to the side, he could see our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, a twinkling, iridescent patch roughly the size of the moon.
Taking in the view for hours, Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department and director of its Institute for Theory and Computation, was overwhelmed upon seeing the things he studied as a theorist suddenly made palpable. While admiring the celestial display, he felt a heightened resolve to answer the question long at the heart of his research agenda: How and when did the first generation of stars and galaxies light up?
The Bible attributes the appearance of these luminous sources to a divine proclamation: “Let there be light.” But Loeb wanted to tell the scientific version of the Genesis story instead.
Chasing Starlight
A youthful-looking 52 with short-cropped brown hair and a compact, athletic build, Loeb did not always plan on becoming an astrophysicist. Born and raised on a farm in Israel, he spent weekends seeking out quiet spots to read and think. “I soon realized that philosophy asked the fundamental questions but often didn’t resolve them,” says Loeb. Science, he realized, might put him in a better position to provide some answers.
