Anja C. Andersen

When Anja C. Andersen was 13, her family moved to Saudi Arabia. She was furious about it. But the night sky there was pristine, never dimmed by city lights, and she would take her stargazer outside to escape the cramped 110-square-meter house she shared with her parents and little brother. “It was a way to get some peace, some legitimate peace,” she says. Decades later, she is a leading astrophysicist at the Niels Bohr Institute, and the question of what that intense scientific thinking does to a person’s spiritual life is exactly what she has come to discuss with priest Sørine Godfredsen.

The Paradox of the Starry Sky

Andersen describes her relationship to the cosmos as a bundle of contradictions. She has always been afraid of the dark—as a child she slept with the light on—yet she was “enormously fascinated by standing out in the evening and looking up at the stars.” The full moon was a relief during night orientations at school camp. She feels “connected to the stars” in a way that is almost physical: “all the raw materials that we’re made of, my carbon atoms, they come from the stars.” That sense of connection is not the same as love. It is more like wonder, mixed with a quieter fear. She recalls a mother who came up after a lecture and said she never looks up at night because she is afraid of being “sucked out of the emptiness.” Andersen understood her perfectly. “I