Think, for a moment, about the astrophysics of a sunrise. The dizzying mechanics are cosmic in scope: The earth spinning on its axis at 1,000 mph, orbiting in a 584 million-mile track around a star that’s about a million times larger than our planet, so far distant that its light – dashing through space at nearly 300 million miles per second – travels more than eight minutes before kissing the face of the earth.