Or in his own words: ‘I had a real thirst for knowledge.’ Why do climbing plants always grow in the same direction around a pole? And how do they know where to grow if they don’t have eyes? This could preoccupy young Arnout for days. From a young age already – growing up on a tea plantation in the Dutch East Indies – he saw the most miraculous things happening right in front of his nose. He still wants to see, hear, smell, taste and touch everything. Why doesn’t he sit back and enjoy his retirement? He is too much of a ‘born observer,’ he laughs. He shares an office with two colleagues who recently reached the ripe old age of 67, ‘young pensioners’ as he calls them. He goes to the University once or twice per week, mainly to ask the ‘clever clogs’ at the IT department for help. This is how the octogenarian has spent many an evening, at his desk that looks out on the ferns in his front garden. You get more of a sense of what is going on.
#Twinkle world manual
This could be done on a computer, but his painstaking manual labour brings a star to life on paper, says Van Genderen as he sets down a tray with two cups of Darjeeling on it. Plot all the dots next to one another on a sheet of squared paper and you get undulating lines of dots that give a good impression of the fluctuating luminosity of the stars. Over the past few years he has made thousands of dots on paper of this and other hypergiants, each dot representing the luminosity of a particular star at a particular moment in time. If a noise distracts him, he just turns down the volume on his hearing aid. And he knew he couldn’t give up he had to solve the mystery of the yellow hypergiant, a giant star about 600 times the size of our sun. But then he saw once again this ineffably large star that was making a beating motion somewhere up in the heavens, a bit like the old man’s heart beating in his chest. Perhaps the mystery was simply too big and a person too small to solve it. Obviously there were times when he wanted to give up. If a noise distracts him, he just turns down the volume on his hearing aid. This is how he has spent many an evening in recent years, working in silent concentration. The 83-year-old astronomer takes a large sheet of squared paper and starts making small dots on it. As night falls in Oegstgeest, a town just outside Leiden, Arnout van Genderen takes up position at his wooden desk in the corner of the sitting room.
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