On the Plains of San Agustin, Hicks readied the Very Large Array telescope to look back across the millennium, across the years during which modern humanity made its mark on our planet. A massive, hot star was in the throes of an agonizing birth, and Hicks arrived on Earth at the right moment in history to witness the creation. Hicks is the chief operator of the Very Large Array, a collection of giant radio dishes spread across the Plains of San Agustin, west of Socorro. Friday night, Hicks' plan was to collect data for Lincoln Greenhill, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass . Greenhill wants to understand how that distant star was born.
Space is vast, and time is near eternal when measured on human time scales.
For people like Greenhill and Hicks, a millennium is a single flicker of a cosmic candle. A few hundred thousand years is recent history, about as close to the present as you can get without missing the moment. A million years may as well be yesterday. Even at a billion years they're barely breaking a historical sweat. As humans prepared to measure the passage of a thousand years, watching their calendars roll over to 2000, astronomers' stories are a reminder of the depth of time.