24 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {punchline} From there, they ultimately made their way to New York. “I didn’t speak a word of English,” Andrew recalls. “My mother had the idea of using comic books to teach English to me, and I particularly loved space comics.” He soon graduated to science fiction, and when it came time to choose what to study in college, astronomy was his first choice. “Eventually, I realized I could do space stuff for a living,” he beams. Andrew’s excitement builds as he discusses the latest astronomical discoveries. “It looks like Star Trek was right,” he says with a smile. “There really are planets around other stars.” In 1995, the common perception was that there were just a few planets outside of our own galaxy, Andrew explains. “Now we know there are other suns and 5,000 planets orbiting those suns or stars.” Recent breakthroughs and advances in astronomy are thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. “This is the biggest telescope we have ever had in space, allowing us to look back to the beginning of time,” he marvels. While light travels swiftly, the incredible distances mean that the images show stars as they appeared a very long time ago. “We are now seeing things 13.4 billion years old that are very close to the big bang,” Andrew adds, referring to the theory of the universe’s origin 13.8 billion years ago. “The earliest stars and structures are so far away and so long ago, they are amazing.” Educated at Harvard University and UC Berkeley, Andrew’s career as an astronomer took off in 1992 when he was hired as the executive director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Working 80 hours a week at his job and newly Andrew Fraknoi is a man on a mission—a space mission, that is. For decades, he’s inspired and educated both students and the public on the wonders of astronomy, from Foothill and Cañada colleges to the University of California at San Francisco. “This is the golden age of astronomy,” Andrew declares. From radio stations and local TV to The Today Show, he’s become the Bay Area’s go-to astronomer for explaining celestial phenomena in down-toearth terms. “My focus right now is to interpret the complex and abstract things we are learning about the universe so that people can understand them,” he says. Born in Hungary, Andrew and his family fled during the 1956 revolution against communist rule, and ended up in an Austrian refugee camp. COPYRIGHT © 2024
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