Observe the sky begin to blanch

The months of accreted data, notes, plotted graphs taken from the high, lone telescope in the Andes does not lie: she has proof, certain proof that the white mantle of the Milky Way is spilling from its mold, billowing into space. The world has to know, and her newfound mission takes its toll on her life, beginning with the stressful opprobrium of her peers, then the loss of her grants, her position, her marriage.... And in the end, as more data pours in, it grows painfully clear that she was not quite right and not quite wrong, but had ultimately staked a revolution on hardly an evolutionary footnote, made a waste of her life for the semblance of the shifting shape of the haunting light of distant stars, no more.