Pod Insights Radiolab Galaxy Quenching About this episode This week: the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some galaxies burn bright and others dim and sputter out. And in the midst of an unthinkable grief in her personal life, she discovers something in the sky – a new kind of light that would guide her path forward. Special thanks to Megan Stielstra, Jad Abumrad, Michael Woodrum, Gina Vivona, and Clair Reilly-Roe.
EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Lulu MillerProduced by - Jessica YungFact-checking by - Diane Kelly
Radiolab | Lateral uts:Our episode The Darkest Dark (https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-darkest-dark) could be of interest to those seeking the deepest unknowns. EPISODE CITATIONS:Music -Clair Reilly-Roe’s song “Sky Full of Ghosts” (https://zpr.io/JgauhRnj7qpX)
Articles -A new documentary on Charity Woodrum’s story: Space, Hope and Charity (https://www.spacehopecharityfilm.com/)
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Transcript 0:01 Speaker 00 Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right.
0:08 Speaker 01 You're listening to Radiolab.
0:11 Speaker 02 Radiolab.
0:11 Speaker 01 From?
0:12 Speaker 00 WNYC.
0:14 Speaker 01 See?
0:14 Speaker 00 Yep.
0:19 Speaker 00 The place I really want to start is I wonder if you can tell me about all the different ways a galaxy can die.
0:31 Speaker 03 Okay, so a galaxy can die or quench in a variety of different ways.
0:37 Speaker 00 Wait, and I'm already going to stop you because that weird quench?
0:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
0:41 Speaker 00 Does that mean like galaxy dimming, galaxy dying?
0:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, we call it death in kind of a way or a dimming of sorts, yeah.
0:49 Speaker 00 Got it.
0:49 Speaker 03 So I would define it as any process that prevents star formation from happening.
0:56 Speaker 00 Okay.
0:56 Speaker 03 And for stars to form, you need cold, dense gas.
1:01 Speaker 00 Hmm.
1:02 Speaker 03 You can think of cold, dense gas, mostly hydrogen, as the fuel for star formation.
1:07 Speaker 00 Okay, and so ways that the galaxy quenches is when the stars can't get that fuel?
1:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly.
1:15 Speaker 00 So like what makes that fuel not get there?
1:19 Speaker 03 Well, for example, the supermassive black holes that exist in the center of every massive galaxy, those supermassive black holes can heat up that gas, or the supermassive black holes can have these jets that'll actually expel the gas outside of the galaxy completely into the intergalactic space.
1:40 Speaker 00 Okay, so then the stars just kind of starve?
1:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, and that's a term that actually is used in galaxy quenching. It's called starvation because some of this cold gas can come into the galaxy from what we call the cosmic web.
1:54 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:54 Speaker 03 And if that process gets shut off for some reason, then we call that starvation.
1:59 Speaker 00 So it's like it could get pushed out from the inside or it just stops coming in?
2:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly.
2:04 Speaker 00 Huh.
2:04 Speaker 03 There's starvation, strangulation, yeah, I'm not sure why these words are so violent. I feel like we could have come up with better ones.
2:15 Speaker 00 The current scientific thinking is that there are at least eight ways that a galaxy can die.
2:23 Speaker 00 That's the theory. But Charity Woodrum has spent her career actually looking, trying to observe the physical processes that make them dim and sputter out. I'm Lulu Miller, and today on Radiolab, we have a story of something almost mythic that Charity observed in the darkness. Something I didn't know could happen in space, something Charity never expected to see, something that would nudge science forward in its understanding of how galaxies evolve, and something that would end up nudging her forward ever so slightly through an unthinkable loss.
3:08 Speaker 00 How did you get interested in this morbid branch of astrophysics?
3:16 Speaker 03 Should I start with all the way back to how I got involved in astronomy in general?
3:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, take us all the way back. How the heck did you end up studying how galaxies die?
3:27 Speaker 03 So I grew up in rural Oregon, in a small town called Canyonville. When you grow up in a rural area like that, you get to see the Milky Way. And so being under the dark night sky certainly affected me, and it was certainly a place of peace for me growing up.
3:45 Speaker 00 Was it contrast to in the house, in the school? Anything like that?
3:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, I would definitely say that there was chaos at home. Both of my parents at one time were addicted to some type of drug. My dad, I think one of the words people would use to describe him would be violent. And I think as a distraction, I would go out and look up at the night sky, just be in the backyard, just walking into the grass and laying down in the grass, sometimes with a sleeping bag, you know, under the trees and just looking up at the night sky. Yeah.
4:26 Speaker 03 I was thinking a lot about how big the universe is and how, even though I was in my small town, that the world was a lot bigger, the universe was a lot bigger, and there was just more out there to explore.
4:57 Speaker 03 At a young age, I asked one of my middle school teachers what I could do to work for NASA someday, and he laughed at me.
5:05 Speaker 00 Like a cruel?
5:07 Speaker 03 It was like a chuckle. I don't think he was trying to be cruel, because at the time, it didn't make sense to me. I was the valedictorian of our high school, but, you know, looking back, my graduating class only had 17 people. And he also knew my family history. Neither of my parents graduated high school. And just, you know, we grew up in a very low-income area. And so I think he was seeing all of that. There were no other scientists in that town. A lot of the jobs would either be logging or going to nursing school, but I had never heard about a scientist before. At the time, I was like, OK, I don't know how to do this then.
5:49 Speaker 00 So then, what do you, what do you end up going on to study? What's the next chapter?
5:55 Speaker 03 So, once I graduated high school, my biggest goal, I guess, was to escape poverty, and I became a registered nurse. But, once I started working as a nurse, I couldn't handle the emotional toll of it, just seeing human suffering on a daily basis, like, an older person not getting visited, or even, you know, once a week, there would be something absolutely catastrophic that you would see. And I found myself just thinking about it all the time, and it was really affecting my daily life. So, at the time, Jason, what would be my future husband, one of his coping mechanisms was to read books. He read, you know, hundreds of books a year.
6:34 Speaker 00 Whoa.
6:35 Speaker 03 And, yeah, he was like, "Why don't you pick up some books? Maybe that will get your mind off of it." I started picking up popular science books by, you know, like, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, and started reading about those. There's a particular image, actually, itself, that's one of the main reasons that I went back to school to study physics. It's called the Hubble Deep Field.
6:56 Speaker 00 Hubble Deep Field. Okay.
6:58 Speaker 03 I encountered it in one of those books. And basically, this image, how it was made, was they found the darkest part of the sky. So as far as we knew, there was nothing there. And some astronomers said, why don't we point the Hubble Space Telescope at this dark patch of sky for 10 days? Which was a very kind of bold and crazy move because Hubble Space Telescope time is very precious and expensive. And some people thought nothing would be there. Like, why point it in complete darkness? And yeah, they used Hubble to stare at this dark place in the sky for 10 whole days. And then the image that came back
7:38 Speaker 03 had thousands of galaxies in it.
7:41 Speaker 03 Thousands? Yes.
7:44 Speaker 00 You can easily pull this image up. Just Google the Hubble Deep Field. It looks like someone threw glitter on a black floor. And there's like some bigger pieces that feel closer. And there's all different colors. I see greens and yellows and oranges and blues and whites. And so are each one of those dots a galaxy?
8:07 Speaker 03 If it's very bright and has those spikes around it, it's a star with, you know, a star in between us and those galaxies. But everything else is an entire galaxy.
8:16 Speaker 00 Wow. She said you could also see where the dying ones are.
8:21 Speaker 03 There's some red orb galaxies in there.
8:22 Speaker 00 Oh, there are?
8:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
8:24 Speaker 00 Oh, they kind of, are they like these orangey ones?
8:26 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're really red. We call them quiescent galaxies when they're red and dead like that.
8:32 Speaker 00 Oh, quiescent, like quiet or dormant? Like, it's there, but it's not making new stuff?
8:38 Speaker 03 Right, exactly.
8:43 Speaker 03 And so I was just sitting there staring at that image. Each of those galaxies has billions of stars. And each of those stars, we think, has at least one planet.
8:52 Speaker 00 Wow.
8:52 Speaker 03 And I don't know. Kind of gave me the feeling that I got as a kid laying under the night sky. And it also just kind of calmed me. I wasn't thinking about that human suffering that I was seeing on a daily basis.
9:11 Speaker 03 I was actually nine months pregnant when I walked into an academic counselor at the University of Oregon and said, "Hey, I'm a registered nurse, but I want to go back to school for physics." Wow. He looked at me like I was crazy a little bit. But around the time when I was pregnant with my son, I was thinking about, you know, what type of person I wanted to be for him. Because I wanted him to pursue his biggest dreams and I felt the only way to do that was to pursue mine. And how was that going to work? What was Jason doing? He had a soil company business. He would literally sell dirt to people. He loved soil. That was his big passion because he loved,
9:54 Speaker 03 you know, reading about all the bacteria in the soil and how it was alive and all of that. And so we always made the joke that whenever he was looking down, I was looking up. So at first, you know, I have a new baby now and I'm starting my first term. And so I wanted it to be a little bit easier and only be gone away from Woody for, you know, an hour or two a day. I didn't want to be away from him for too long. Wait, was Woody short for anything? Or Woody is given name? Yeah, that was his given name. So, OK, Woody's a little baby. Yeah. And on the first day of class, I met Dr. Scott Fisher, who was an astrophysicist. And he, you know, he wasn't Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan. He was like a normal person that had this job that I... And that was the first time I realized like,
10:38 Speaker 03 oh, I could actually have a job in this field. You have a job. You've got healthcare. You've got a salary. Yeah. And you get to think about this stuff. Exactly. I was like, OK, that's what I want to do now. So after taking that first day of class, in Dr. Fisher's class, I started bugging him every day and I would just go to his office and ask him if I could join his research group. And he'd be like, you know, "My research group is full. Come back later." So I'd be like, "OK, come back a week later." A week later? Yeah, I was really annoying. And so he said, "You know what?" His boss had a research project for a student. And so she asked if he had any students. And he was like, "Well, there's this one girl that won't give up, so let's go with her."
11:23 Speaker 03 So, and she worked in the field of galaxy evolution.
11:32 Speaker 00 The research group was Charity and three other undergrads, and they called themselves the Cosmic Wolf Pack. And together, they taught themselves how to read the flickers in the sky, how the blue ones were newborns and the red ones were dying. She said they'd often get yelled at for squealing too loud when some new image came back showing galaxies of beautiful colors or shapes, clusters.
11:57 Speaker 03 Almost every weekend, over the summers, I would go up to Pine Mountain Observatory, giving people tours of the night sky with one of the bigger telescopes up there. And Jason and Woody would camp. And before Woody's bedtime, they would be in the dome with me as I was talking about the night sky. And then they would go sleep in the tent and wait for me to get done, which would be much later, much past Woody's bedtime.
12:21 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:22 Speaker 03 The first year, I would have to go back to breastfeed him quite often. So I actually would have to shut down the dome and say, "I can hear my baby crying in the distance. He's hungry." And so I would go feed him and then come back.
12:33 Speaker 00 In the sleeping bag, just cozied up?
12:35 Speaker 03 Yeah. So this must have been when he was around two years old. There had been a lot of cloudy nights all in a row. And we stepped onto the porch one time, and it was a clear night sky. And he looked at me and he said, "Oh, thank you, Mom." I said, "For what?" And he said, "For turning the stars on." So he thought that when I was giving people tours of the night sky, that I was the one that turned the stars on at night, I guess. And I looked at Jason, and he was crying.
13:04 Speaker 00 Was it like a battle with Jason? Was Jason like, "Woody, look at the soil." And you were like, "Woody, look at the stars." And you won?
13:10 Speaker 03 No, I would say it was quite equal because Jason loved vegetable gardening. And so Woody was often in the garden with Jason. And they would come inside to eat lunch and then leave again, back to go gardening. And I knew where they sat because there would be four little piles of dirt from where they had sat down. Yeah. Yeah, they were both very sweet.
13:39 Speaker 00 At what point do you learn about rejuvenation in this story?
13:47 Speaker 03 So that happened when I was in my second to third year of graduate school.
13:53 Speaker 00 And can I just ask, like, for setting in time? Is this before or after the worst day?
13:59 Speaker 03 This is after the worst day. So the worst day happened my junior year in the physics program.
14:07 Speaker 00 OK. So I guess for chronology, maybe we we do this to the degree that you want to, however you want to talk about it. Do you want to, do you want to take a break first? Do you want to just plow through? How do you want to go?
14:19 Speaker 03 Let me take a sip of water real quick and then I will.
14:21 Speaker 00 Yeah. We'll be back in a moment.
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17:37 Speaker 00 I guess just, can you say what happened on January 15, 2017?
17:44 Speaker 03 Yeah. So it was a long weekend, and me and my son and husband decided to take a mini vacation to the Oregon coast. And it was especially sunny on the Oregon coast for it being wintertime. And a lot of people that are not from the Pacific Northwest might not know about this, but there's these things called sneaker waves. And we were walking along the beach and the water would come up to the same place every single time. And I was walking a little bit ahead of them. And one of those sneaker waves, you know, hit them and swept them out to sea.
18:26 Speaker 03 My memory, you know, fades in and out on that day. I eventually found myself in an ambulance and my eyes were closed and I felt a banging on my head. And I woke up and realized I was hitting myself in the head saying, you know, wake up, this can't be real. And, you know, then I realized it's getting dark outside and I had heard that the Coast Guard was going to call off the search once it got dark. And so then I, I guess I started freaking out because apparently I jumped out of the ambulance door through the back and just started running towards what I thought was the ocean, but I actually didn't see the ocean nearby. I didn't know where I was.
19:06 Speaker 03 I'm barefoot. One of the cops, you know, pulls me back into the ambulance. And I guess I did that a couple of times. Yeah, eventually they drove me to the hospital and I guess I was just screaming a lot and, you know, couldn't, I was just screaming. And so a nurse came up to me and had a pill in her hand and she said, do you want to just fall asleep? And I took that pill.
19:38 Speaker 03 And I was hospitalized like that for about five days, I believe.
19:44 Speaker 03 I woke up and I realized, you know, it made national news that, you know, Jason and Woody had been, you know, swept out to sea.
19:56 Speaker 00 Is there anything in running through the field? Was it like wanting to find them? Was it wanting to join them?
20:05 Speaker 03 I feel like it was, I was trying to, I realized that they weren't going to search for them anymore and I wanted to find them. I think that was my intention. They took that as me being suicidal. I didn't, I didn't think, I didn't think I was, but I've heard people say that they thought that I wanted to join them. So they sent me to a psych ward. But the next morning, I had a, a meeting with the psychiatrist there, the psychologist, and I said, I can't be here. There, there was nothing to do. There was, there were books, but I found that I couldn't even read. I would try to read and I couldn't even read.
20:45 Speaker 00 Meaning you couldn't make sense of the words? Or you just, it felt too flat?
20:49 Speaker 03 Like it didn't, it felt like I, I was reading the words, but I wasn't processing them, if that makes sense?
20:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:57 Speaker 03 I've never tried to describe that before. But yeah, I couldn't read the books. And, and I was afraid to watch any TV because if a scene of the ocean would come up, I would have a panic attack. And so that's what the first week looked like, basically. So after being released from the hospital and, and the psych ward, there's no way I could have walked back into the house that I shared with Woody and Jason. I went and stayed with close family. And those first few weeks, I, I didn't leave the couch, really. I would just lay there.
21:36 Speaker 03 And laying on that couch, I really felt like I could feel the life going out of me. Because there was nothing left for me, I felt like.
21:52 Speaker 03 Where do you go?
21:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I knew I had to do something and I knew that laying on that couch wasn't going to get me that desire to live back. And I remember people close to me, they apparently had this group chat and they always made sure that one of them was at my house with me at any given time for those first few weeks. And they knew that as a kid, I loved school and thought it would be a good distraction for me, I think. And so they said, why don't you go back to school?
22:25 Speaker 03 And actually, when I told Dr. Fisher that I wanted to go back to school, during that meeting, he was crying and he said, you know, your life is turned completely upside down. Nothing's the same. So if you want to come back to the research group, the research group would be exactly the way it was before. This can be the one spot that never changed. Hearing him say that was a huge reason I was able to go back. But when I went back to school, when people would see me for the first time, their eyes would kind of look like a deer in headlights, like, oh no, what do I say to her? And also, I looked very different. I normally wear a lot of bright colors, but I was wearing the same black hoodie and black leggings every day and I was 15 pounds lighter.
23:10 Speaker 03 And I think I wanted people to see that I was different now. I wasn't the same person I was. But at the same time, seeing their reaction, that was hard.
23:22 Speaker 03 So she looked up.
23:29 Speaker 03 I'm an extragalactic astronomer, so I study galaxies outside of our own.
23:35 Speaker 03 And to do that, to find those distant galaxies, what you have to do is exactly what they did with the Hubble Deep Field. You have to find the darkest part of the sky and look at it. And that's literally what I do, is just look in the darkest places and try to find light there.
24:05 Speaker 00 She graduates college, starts grad school, and keeps looking into the dark, day after day. And when she'd see a faraway sprinkle of galaxies, she'd focus in on the red orbs, the dying ones, the dimming ones. And she'd perform autopsies, trying to figure out whether it had been something from the outside or the inside which caused it to lose its light. Day after day, galaxy after galaxy.
24:46 Speaker 00 And then one day, 1,639 days after the worst day, she saw something odd. She was looking at this one group of eight dimming galaxies.
25:03 Speaker 03 They were massive quiescent galaxies.
25:05 Speaker 00 Quiescent, which means they were not making new stars. So they're that kind of like holding pattern, red, slowly dying but still emitting light vibe.
25:15 Speaker 03 Right, uh huh. And getting the data back, the first scientists that looked at these galaxies found that four of the massive quiescent galaxies had cold gas reservoirs and four of them did not.
25:26 Speaker 00 Huh.
25:27 Speaker 03 Yeah. We do know that cold gas reservoirs are the fuel for star formation.
25:32 Speaker 00 And so was that at first puzzling? Because you're like, the whole thing about why they die is like, it's pushed out, or it's heated up, or it's ejected, or it's... And you're like, but the food is right there. It's there.
25:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. So why do some of them have the cold gas reservoirs and some of them don't?
25:50 Speaker 00 So she started measuring everything she could think of, sort of taking the vitals of those galaxies with cold gas reservoirs. She looked at their metal composition, their growth charts, how they had grown in stars and mass over time.
26:03 Speaker 03 One of the things that I was able to measure was what's called the star formation history of the galaxy. So think of that as on the Y axis, there would be the star formation rate. So how many stars these galaxies are forming per year? And on the X axis, you have time. And so their early star formation histories, when they were younger galaxies, those all looked quite similar. However, in the last billion years, all of the galaxies that had the cold gas reservoirs in the last billion years of the galaxy's life, there was a bump in their star formation. There was this significant amount of what we called secondary star formation episodes or rejuvenation.
26:47 Speaker 00 Wait, so meaning like these dying, dimming galaxies, the ones that had the gas were making new stars from a place of death?
26:57 Speaker 03 Yeah.
26:58 Speaker 00 What?
26:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, and people had seen rejuvenation before, but I don't know that anyone had seen cold gas reservoirs in massive quiescent galaxies and saw that they also had rejuvenation episodes.
27:12 Speaker 00 Like you saw the the physical matter of what it takes to come back to life for a galaxy?
27:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly.
27:21 Speaker 00 Then, does it still sputter out? Or does it, could it ever like, get back into real star formation? Could it ever like, keep going and get alive again?
27:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, definitely.
27:33 Speaker 00 Oh, it could?
27:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, just like with the physical processes that can make a galaxy quench, there's physical processes that can make a galaxy rejuvenate as well.
27:47 Speaker 00 Broadly speaking, there are four main ways that a galaxy can come back to life. One, it can happen from within. The black hole at its center surges with an unexpected burst of energy that allows new stars to form. The rest of the ways happen from without. A sudden inflow of gas, a huge collision.
28:09 Speaker 03 Two galaxies collide and eventually form one galaxy together.
28:14 Speaker 00 Or, while this to me, and what Charity believes caused rejuvenation in the galaxies she was looking at, just a little.
28:23 Speaker 03 If two galaxies even interact with each other and do like a flyby, where they just fly by each other, that little interaction can cause bursts of star formation as well.
28:33 Speaker 00 No.
28:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:34 Speaker 00 And like can bring it back to life?
28:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:36 Speaker 00 Just like a drive by encounter?
28:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, just like seeing a friend and it, you know, lifts your mood.
28:55 Speaker 03 My childhood best friends, they're the biggest reasons I was I was able to survive and make it to where I am today.
29:03 Speaker 03 When I was laying on that couch, the people coming over and helping me had no reason to other than that they loved me. And I don't think a lot of people get to know who those people would be in your life, and I know who they are.
29:17 Speaker 00 There was her brother.
29:18 Speaker 03 He sat me down and told me, you know, me and his wife Gina and the artist Claire wrote a song for you and we want to play it for you.
29:29 Speaker 03 They weren't afraid to talk to me about what happened. They just wanted to be there.
29:36 Speaker 00 There was the cosmic wolf pack.
29:38 Speaker 03 You know, they just, yeah, they were exactly what I needed.
29:43 Speaker 00 And even random strangers.
29:46 Speaker 03 A woman online saw my story and she said, hey, I don't know how to help you, but I think my friend Lynn can because she's been through something just as, you know, tragic. And so Lynn offered to meet up with me and we had dinner. She had lost three daughters and a husband, and so I felt like just being around her felt like it was the first person that could understand what I was going through. And we would be at dinner publicly crying and talking to each other about our grief. And then she would invite me to events and at these events she would be laughing and full of life to the point where everyone in the room wanted to be around her because of it. You know, she's like, come bike riding with me, come to the opera with me.
30:29 Speaker 03 It was just the first time that I could see that you can carry the heavy grief with you, but you can also still have happiness again and maybe even hope.
30:45 Speaker 03 She had something that dimmed her light just as much as mine did. But she was able to come back again. And then I would think about the field of galaxy evolution in general and how when galaxies interact, actually, the gas can flow between them. And so, gas could flow from a star-forming galaxy to a quenched galaxy and ignite star formation in that way.
31:13 Speaker 03 After meeting Lynn, I decided I needed to find things that gave me joy again and that I can do astronomy and astrophysics for myself as well as for Woody and Jason. And I could be happy again and it would actually honor them. Because early on in grief, you feel like you have to be sad all the time or something, but that's not going to honor them. And I think Lynn showed me that.
31:48 Speaker 03 I did find out recently that a colleague lost a loved one in her life. And I reached out to her and said, "Hey, the kindness of strangers once helped me through my early days of grief." And we went on a hike, actually, a couple of days ago. Yeah.
32:03 Speaker 00 What was it like to be the Lynn to her charity?
32:08 Speaker 03 I mean, it was rewarding. And yeah, we're going to go biking together. So I just kind of was like, "Okay, what did Lynn do for me?" We went on walks. We went on biking trips. And so, we're just doing that together. And I'm just trying to listen. And I don't think I'll be as good as Lynn was to me, but maybe it'll help her in some way.
32:32 Speaker 03 I look for things where I can shine bright for somebody else or honor the people who shined so bright for me. And that brings me a lot of meaning. And I also think I now have my dream job. I work at NASA now.
32:47 Speaker 00 Wait, so? Thinking of the teacher who chuckled, like what? How did that come to be? And what do you do at NASA?
32:55 Speaker 03 I'm working with the James Webb Space Telescope. Right now, I'm studying galaxies in the early universe. And I'm studying the stardust in galaxies in the early universe with the James Webb Space Telescope. And guess what? They're in or near the Hubble Deep Field. So this is like a perfect full circle moment for me. Some of the galaxies I'm studying are actually in the Hubble Deep Field. But the data comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. So the newer generation of stars form out of the ashes of the old generations of stars. And so I'm actually studying that dust, that stardust, or that ashes, if you will, in those early, early galaxies. Yeah, I'm a NASA postdoctoral fellow there.
33:38 Speaker 00 Cool, with a badge?
33:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, with a badge.
33:50 Speaker 00 It's been, what, seven years, eight years?
33:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, over eight years.
33:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, and obviously, when you talk about it, like, I can hear the distance, like, or the shield, or whatever it is that you have to erect to get through your day and your life?
34:08 Speaker 03 Yeah. At first, grief is like crushing, I would say. And you're learning to carry it, but it crushes you. And as time goes on, you're able to carry it better. I have less, you know, random tearfulness episodes, but they still happen. Sometimes it'll happen when I'm driving or doing dishes for no apparent reason. Sometimes it'll happen and I'll come home and my house is clean. There's not four piles of dirt on the couch. Or, you know, seeing a class of kids that are Woody's age, what he would be now. Things like that, I still get tearful about, and it can... It can still happen, but I'm just better at carrying it, I guess.
34:52 Speaker 00 Do you have like a memorial place, a special spot?
34:57 Speaker 03 Well, Woody was never found, but Jason was found. And that was actually on Valentine's Day of 2017. So Jason was cremated. So for the longest time, I had his ashes in an urn. But I felt like the right thing to do would be to return them to the ocean to be with Woody. Jason really loved rivers and the forest. And so I was able to find this river near the ocean, right by the ocean. So I could hear the waves, but I couldn't see them. And it was just this very peaceful place. And I poured his ashes in the river and they flowed out into the ocean. Near where it happened.
35:41 Speaker 00 Oh, my God, what a beautiful way to.
35:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, my childhood best friends were there that day. And afterwards, they said that that was magical. Because right as we pulled up and sat down, you couldn't even see anything. It was just all fog. And then suddenly this like wind came through and cleared out all the fog. And you could see the sun. And it was just this very beautiful moment.
36:09 Speaker 00 Like,
36:12 Speaker 00 I mean, you studied ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Like you study that poetic idea.
36:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:18 Speaker 00 Returning to the stars, being made of the stars. And do you think about your evolution as a family? Like the metals and matter of you?
36:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, well, like I'm studying these clouds of gas and dust that are from exploding stars. And so eventually we'll be part of the same cloud of gas and dust again. And maybe we'll forge inside the same star again.
36:48 Speaker 00 The thing that led me to you actually was a tweet that you put out. And it said,
37:00 Speaker 00 Crying while writing my PhD dissertation about galaxy quenching. And then you wrote, "Which will be dedicated to my late son and late husband."
37:11 Speaker 00 And then you, and then you kind of screenshotted the dedication. Can you read that?
37:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:17 Speaker 03 "For Woody and Jason Thomas. From the local universe to the first galaxies, the brightest moments in space and time occurred during our brief epoch together. That light is unquenchable."
37:55 Speaker 00 Is it still true for you that, that the brightest moments in space and time, for you, were, were with them?
38:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, definitely. I, um, I don't think, I don't think that will ever change. Um, you know, being Woody's mom is the best thing I've ever done.
39:15 Speaker 00 Huge thanks to Charity for sharing her story with us.
39:21 Speaker 00 There is a beautiful new documentary about Charity's journey. Just came out and it's winning all kinds of awards. It's called Space, Hope, and Charity. To check it out, schedule a screening, and learn more, visit spacehopecharityfilm.com.
39:43 Speaker 00 This episode was produced by Jessica Young. It was sound designed by Dylan Keefe and fact-checked by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Jad Abumrad and Megan Stielstra.
40:12 Speaker 00 Finally, a big special thanks to Charity's brother, Michael Woodrum, her sister-in-law Gina Vivona, and the singer Claire Riley Rowe, who together wrote Charity that song while she was grieving. It's called "Sky Full of Ghosts," and I listened to it easily 100 times or so while working on this piece. And I wanted to end today by playing it here.
40:37 Speaker 06 All this time and all this space. Is it 20 years or just two days? Seems like forever since yesterday. Now we're light years away.
41:05 Speaker 06 I got my head up in the clouds above. Because I know that's where you are.
42:03 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Greta, and I'm from Santa Rosa, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Lotte V. Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Key is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyana Sunambam, Matt Keelty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vitza, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.
42:43 Speaker 01 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujo Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.
42:52 Speaker 07 Hi, I'm Victor from Springfield, Missouri. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Stone Foundation.
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